


Going Down, Down, Down

by fantasticpants



Category: The Stand - Stephen King
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Blow Jobs, Cunnilingus, Devotion, Dubious Consent, F/M, Femdom, Fingerfucking, M/M, Multi, Orgasm Delay/Denial, Pining, Porn With Plot, Power Play, Protectiveness, Randall Flagg Made Them Do It, Redemption, Uncertainty If Partner Is Capable/In A Position To Consent, Voyeur Gives Directions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-25
Updated: 2019-03-26
Packaged: 2019-12-07 09:22:24
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 3
Words: 23,777
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18232979
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fantasticpants/pseuds/fantasticpants
Summary: Nadine Cross comes to the end of her journey, but there are still games left to be played.





	1. Nowhere to Run to, Baby

**Author's Note:**

  * For [scioscribe](https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/gifts).



> Your wonderful prompts crept into my head and birthed this little monster. The smut grew quite a bit of story, and I hope you enjoy it!
> 
> Two amazing fics helped provide inspiration: [Take the House](https://archiveofourown.org/works/15935267) and [How I Love to Love Nadine](https://archiveofourown.org/works/15933713).
> 
>  **Content warnings:** Canon-typical levels of darkness and general fucked-up-ness. Consent is highly dubious whenever Flagg is involved, surprising no one.

_Nowhere to run to, baby,_  
_Nowhere to hide_  
_\- Martha Reeves_

 _You can't start a fire_  
_Worrying about your little world falling apart_  
_This gun's for hire_  
_Even if we're just dancing in the dark_  
_\- Bruce Springsteen_

 _The killing moon_  
_Will come too soon_  
_\- Echo and the Bunnymen_

 

The last time Lloyd went out into the desert alone, it was to burn the torn up, blood-sticky body of the woman he'd been sleeping with and spilling secrets to, and he’s not too eager for a return trip.

Not that he’s got any say in the matter.

Tonight, driving along the moonlit desert road, he’s on a new and different sort of errand.

_It's a very special night, Lloyd. Can you hear the wedding bells? I'd like you to go and fetch me my bride. She's on her way._

When Flagg told him that, Lloyd’s first, stupid thought was that he was speaking in code, meaning something else entirely. Lloyd could hear no bells, and the whole notion of the dark man taking a wife struck him as somewhere just south of crazy. Exactly what kind of woman would choose to hitch herself to the Walkin Dude?

Not a sane one, that’s for damn sure.

(But then he’s stuck on the word _choose._ Who said anything about her getting to choose?)

The sun went down about an hour ago and Lloyd is still driving in the dark, his sunglasses now clipped to his shirt. The tedium of the long drive has long since transformed into a trance-like, mind-numbing boredom, and the only thing keeping him from falling asleep at the wheel is the disquiet that keep tickling the hairs at the nape of his neck. He doesn't know what strange and terrible secret he’ll find out here in the desert, and doesn’t particularly want to try and guess.  

(His mind still helpfully conjures up the image of a head-chomping mantis woman, probably thanks to a scary movie he snuck into as a kid, about giant mutant ants coming from the desert.)

He’s halfway through a yawn when he finally he sees something: a lone figure walking along the road, with long white hair blowing behind it in the wind.

He blinks. His first thought is that it must be a mirage, one of those visions you get when you’re badly dehydrated and starting to trip balls. Or maybe it’s a ghost. His heart does an unpleasant leap-and-drop, but he ignores it and drives on, slowing the car. The closer he gets to the figure, the clearer he can see that it's a woman, flesh and blood, walking steadily along the road, coming his way.

Well, that’s gotta be the lucky lady.

He pulls the car to a stop, and the woman stops too, waiting as Lloyd steps out of the car and approaches her. The desert winds swirls and whistles around them, muffling his footsteps.

From up close, he's struck by how pretty she is. No, _beautiful_ is the word he’s after, and not in a centerfold sorta way, either, but like she’s climbed out of some fancy oil painting that used to sell for millions, back when money meant anything. The white hair is weird, but it doesn’t make her look old, just otherworldly. And her eyes are like dark pools of… not quite water, but something thicker and more dangerous than that. They would pull you in and you would drown, but it wouldn’t be such a bad way to go.

At least he can’t fault Flagg for his taste in women.

“Hello,” she says, and through the howling desert wind her voice sounds muted, like she's speaking from farther away. "Did he send you to bring me to him?"

"Yeah, that's right," Lloyd says. “I’ll be your ride tonight.” Then, remembering his manners, he sticks out his hand, “I’m Lloyd Henreid.”

“Nadine Cross.”

She doesn’t smile when she takes his hand, and she shakes it with a weak, mild grip, probably being polite out of habit. He can feel her eyes on him, but her gaze is distant, like she's looking right through him and past him, looking towards something farther down the road.

Lloyd knows exactly what -- _who_ \-- is waiting for her over there, and the thought sends a comfortless shiver through him.

He leads her to the car, opens the door for her and shuts it behind her.

They drive in the dark for a while, saying nothing. She only stares ahead, and he mostly tries not to think.

"You must've come a long way," he says, eventually; the desert may like the silence just fine, but Lloyd's never been very good with it, and it's starting to eat at him.

She doesn’t answer at first, and he thinks maybe she didn’t even hear him, but then she makes an airy sound that’s not even in the neighborhood of a laugh.

“Oh,” she says. “You have no idea.”

He doesn’t, and he’s pretty sure he doesn’t want to have an idea. All he knows is that the set, grim expression that she’s wearing is far from the starry-eyed excitement of a bride about to meet the man of her dreams. If anything, it reminds him of the look some of the men in his Phoenix cell block wore, the ones who were preparing for their coming execution and had made a sort of glum peace with it. It’s that blank, distant look. The final acceptance.

 _Dead Men Walking_ , he recalls unhappily, _that’s what you call ‘em._

He taps his fingers on the wheel, trying to come up with something else to say. He doubts she’s up for some casual chit-chat, and he thinks about trying to reassure her -- maybe telling her she doesn’t need to worry, _he's_ not so bad, you know, just takes a little getting used to. And sure, the last woman who was in his presence, he nearly tore in half in a crazy fit of rage, but that’s nothing to break a sweat over. Surely he’ll treat his wife just swell.  

He decides he’s better off keeping his mouth shut.

The desert swims idly around them, and he catches her gaze in the rearview mirror. She has a different look in her eyes -- not dead acceptance, but a look of paralyzing fear. She’s terrified.

And Lloyd wants to stop the car, tell her to get out and fucking _run_ , while she still can. Tell her it doesn’t matter where she goes, as long as she just keeps running and doesn’t look back.

… Yeah, _right_. It's a dumb as fuck idea, sure to get him skinned alive or something, and as it happens, he kinda likes having skin. He extinguishes the thought before it has the chance to grow, grateful he hasn't yet gone completely off his rocker.

It’s not his business, he tells himself, what Flagg does with her; he’s just here to play the chauffeur, bring her to Vegas safe and keep his mouth shut. It’s far from the hardest job Flagg has ever tasked him with.

They drive in silence the rest of the way.

Nadine seems out of it, when they pull up by the sleeping MGM Grand, and he offers his hand to help her out of the car. She takes his hand, but she grips it too hard, like she’s afraid to let go. Lloyd swallows, not knowing what to do. There’s fuck-all he _can_ do. The moment stretches on uncomfortably, and then she lets go. She comes with him, as silent as the grave.

He brings her to the elevator, takes her to the top floor, where _he_ is waiting for her.

Back in his room, Lloyd washes his face, figuring he’s missed his chance to sleep tonight. He tries not to look in the mirror.

\---

The blond man with the frightened eyes and _his_ stone leaves her in a long golden hallway. He’s busy studying his shoes as he waits for the elevator door to shut, as if he can’t bear to look at her.

There’s a gun holstered in the waistband of his pants, and for a wild moment she thinks about snatching it and…

And then what? She would make a run for it? She would go in to meet her bridegroom, guns blazing? Now there’s a fantasy.

The elevator door closes, and then it’s just her, alone.

Fear grips her, frosting her veins, but there’s nothing to be done about that. It’s far too late to run. She has scorched the earth behind her, and there’s only one way left for her to go, to her singular destination, to _him._

She goes. Like in a dream, she’s pulled towards the inevitable, a fly cursed with self-awareness, yet irresistibly drawn to the spider’s lair. She takes step after step, feeling inside and outside herself, her heart thumping dully, her throat drying up. She draws closer and closer to the open door, and there’s a sick heat radiating from within.

She feels only cold.

“ _Nadine, Nadine,_ how I love to love Nadine,” comes his sing-song voice, a gentle crooning, and she goes, as if steering a body not her own. “Come in, my dear. I’ve been waiting.”

She steps inside. And there he is, in his faded denims and his dusty boots, coming towards her with a slow-spreading smile, the promise of madness in his eyes.

“Hello,” she says. “I’m here.”

“Yes, you are,” he says, and he takes her hand. His smile grows larger, a deep crescent, and his eyes are on her, hungry, salivating. “Come upstairs with me, Nadine, and be my wife.”

 _No,_ she thinks, clinging to some last sliver of resistance, _no, anything but this, anything--_

She comes with him. In just a few moments, her fear won’t matter. There will no fear, no before. Only _him_.

He leads her upstairs, to a large sundeck under a starry, endless sky, and there’s that pulsing throb between her legs rising up, eclipsing all thought, all fears, making her hunger and ache for this final culmination. Her lover slips his lineless hands around her waist, infecting her with his heat, and she’s sure that just by touching her, he could burn every bone in her body as easily as lighting a match.

_And fuck her anyway, a dead-eyed husk with no limbs, no thoughts, with nothing but that horrible, throbbing need._

_He will fuck her until there’s nothing left but ravaged flesh, and she will_ **_love_** _it._

A choked moan escapes her, and her gaze slips to the railing that separates the sundeck from the wide open air. She finds herself calculating how many steps it would take her to run and throw herself off the edge of the building.

It’d be quite a long drop. But not as long as _his_ way. Nowhere near as long.

But he is holding her tight. Even if she decided to run, she couldn’t.

What he isn’t doing, yet, is pulling her down and taking her. Something is stopping him. There is still a gap, a small distance between them that still allows her to breathe and to thinks. He stands with a look of agitated concentration on his face, as if a mosquito is buzzing around him, unseen, but causing a great irritation.

“The moon--” he says, finally. “It isn’t right.”

The moon...?

She looks up. The moon, which was full a few days ago, now has a slice of rock cut out of it, leaving a flawed, uneven shape to hang in the night sky.

He smiles, and in a great parody of intimacy, slides his long, limber finger along her cheek, and down her throat. She feels it burn underneath her skin, and the trail it leaves is shivering cold.

“We can’t have that. I want our first night together to be perfect, my love. It needs to be _just right_ , don’t you agree? Will you wait for me a little while longer? Only until our full moon rises.”

“The full moon,” she says, and manages to twist her lips into something (nothing) like a smile. “Yes, of course. That’s-- that’s very romantic.”

He laughs, a sound that creeps into her skin and worms inside her through every orifice, and he pulls her closer, holding her so very, _very_ tight.

“You’re such a good sport, my sweet Nadine. I know this is hard for you, but don’t you worry. I’ll keep you happy and well-satisfied until the time comes.” He kisses her neck, and she shudders, inside and out. A sound comes out of her that isn’t quite human. “We’ll play. And the time will come so very, very soon.”

She looks up over his shoulder, at the moon that has won her a stay of execution. It stares back placidly.

She doesn’t know if she should laugh or scream.

\---

“Lloyd! Come in,” Flagg beckons him in, and Lloyd steps into the dark man’s penthouse. They don’t stop in the living room area, like usual. Instead, Flagg leads him into a spacious bedroom. "I believe you've met my bride.”

She’s sitting at the edge of the bed, her legs crossed, dressed in a pretty blue dress. Lloyd’s relieved to see her breathing and in one piece. She looks better, he thinks. Or calmer, anyway.

“Yeah,” he says, shooting her a weak, half-second smile, which is the most smiling he can usually manage in Flagg’s company.

“Nadine, dear, you remember Lloyd, my ever-faithful right-hand man.”

“Yes,” she smiles, and inclines her head in a small nod. “I do.”

“Well, since we’re all acquainted, let me cut to the chase,” he says, and claps a warm hand over Lloyd’s shoulder. “We have a situation on our hands, Lloyd. A bit of a pickle, so to speak. Nadine and I, pair of old-fashioned lovebirds that we are, haven’t been able to consummate our relationship yet. The time isn’t right yet, you see. And she’s been waiting for this occasion for _such_ a long time.” Flagg’s expression is one of exaggerated sympathy. “Poor little Nadine just can’t get _no satisfaction,_ if you catch my drift. And we can’t leave her unsatisfied, now can we?”

It takes Lloyd a second to realize his input is required. “Uh, no?” he guesses, and tries hard to keep his deep confusion out of his voice. The last thing he was expecting was to get a report of Flagg and the missus-to-be’s lack of a sex life. He can feel the heat rising to his face, and he doesn’t know where to bury his gaze.

“Well now. I know you haven’t been having much luck in the sack recently either. Unless you’ve had _another_ spy leap into your bed.”

“N-no,” Lloyd says quickly, shooting Flagg a wide-eyed look. “Jesus, no.”

Flagg bursts into hearty laughter.

“I’m just kidding, Lloyd! That sad business is all forgiven and forgotten. But now, we have some new business, and I think you’re going to like it quite a bit.”

“Okay.”

“Want to take a guess?”

Lloyd doesn’t. He doesn’t have the first clue what Flagg is getting at it. His gaze darts to the bride -- Nadine -- hoping she’ll give him some sort of clue as to what’s coming.

But her eyes are dark and distant.

He gives up, and weakly shakes his head.

“You’re a little slower than usual tonight, aincha?” Flagg says affectionately, before slipping his arm over Lloyd’s shoulders. “That’s all right. I’ll spell it out for you.” His voice lowers, as if he’s about to share a secret. “Tonight, Lloyd, I’m giving you the very special honor of pleasuring my bride.”

Lloyd stands very still. He’s sure he’s misheard or misunderstood something, however crisply and clearly Flagg just said those words.

He swallows, thinking that if this is a joke, it’s an awfully dangerous one to laugh at. It’s much better to appear stupid. He sure _feels_ stupid.

“Sorry, I--” he says. “I don’t understand.”

Flagg’s voice silks into his ear, “Oh, but I think you do. _Look at her_.”

Lloyd looks. She’s very nice to look at, that’s for sure, but until now, he’s been able to neatly separate that observation from any kind of sexual thought. He think it’s a pretty canny self-defense mechanism, actually, because having sexual thoughts about Flagg’s bride is surely a one-way ticket to getting his balls nailed to a cross.

She smiles at him, a smile that’s slow and sweet and damn near perfect, but Lloyd thinks that the edges of it are a bit strained, a bit forced. He remembers how she was when she just arrived, and he thinks she’s probably faking it.

“Isn’t she the most gorgeous thing you ever seen, Lloyd? Don’t you just want to lick her up and down? Worship every sweet, delicious little inch of her?”

 _No_ isn’t a word that’s in Lloyd’s lexicon when it comes to Flagg, and yet, his throat struggles to make any other word. Or any words at all.

“I--yeah. I guess so.”

“Well, then, what are you waiting for?” Flagg releases him with a light shove, propelling him forward. “You have my permission and my blessing.”

Lloyd walks forward, his steps wobbly and terrified, fighting the urge to look back and see if Flagg is giggling at his gullibility or worse, opening up a mouth full of teeth. Maybe Flagg means to punish him for sleeping with Dayna after all, or for some other perceived slight.

He stops at the edge of the bed, where Flagg’s bride sits, not daring to go any further than that.

“My dear, I think Lloyd’s feeling a teeny weeny bit shy. Will you give him a hand?”

“Come here, Lloyd,” she tells him in an inviting, near-whispering voice that sounds like honey and butter and all sorts of things that go down nice and smooth... only he thinks he hears a tremble in it. Maybe that’s just his imagination. She takes his hand and draws him it onto the bed, to sit beside her. “It’s all right.”

He sits, stiff and anxious, looking between her and Flagg, not sure what he's meant to be doing.

“Let’s get her in the mood, shall we?” Flagg says patiently. “Kiss her, Lloyd.”

The two words take a painfully long time to glue together into something coherent in his head. He turns to her, and his eyes are drawn to her lips; they’re slightly open, perfectly shaped, and he wets his lips on reflex, starting to lean forward. But as he does, she leans back slightly, adjusting her dress to reveal more of her shoulder, and he gets the message: not on the lips. Okay. He leans in, and very slowly, very carefully, touches his lips to where her neck meets her shoulder, half-afraid that touching her skin will make him catch fire.

It doesn’t. She lets out a small, breathy sigh, and he doesn’t know if he should trust it, but he takes it as invitation to keep going, because what else is he gonna do?

He presses another kiss just over her collarbone, a wetter one, with his mouth more open. He feels sort of lightheaded, and he worries that his lips are too dry, and then her fingers are slipping into his hair, and he thinks, well, maybe he’s doing okay.

She takes his hand and moves it to her hip; she’s warm and solid in his grasp, her fingers moving lightly on his scalp, and his throat bobs as he swallows. He kisses her again, on the hollow of her throat, as she tilts her head back.

Lloyd’s never had an out-of-body experience, but he thinks maybe this is what it feels like. It’s like he’s being operated by remote-control, numbly pressing buttons and watching himself do things, barely feeling any of it.

And it’s not even really him pressing the buttons.

“Let’s heat things up a notch,” says Flagg, as if reading his mind. “What do you say, Lloyd? Her dress isn’t gonna take itself off.”

Lloyd pulls back, feeling hot and dizzy again, his pulse throbbing in his temples.

“Will you help me out?” Nadine asks, giving him that soothing smile before leaning forward, giving him access to the clasp on her back. He leans behind her and undoes the clasp, grateful that his hands are steady, because the rest of him sure as shit ain’t.

He helps her pull her dress down, over one shoulder and then the other, trying not to look as more and more of her gets unveiled. It’s like he’s opening up a present that’s not meant for his eyes at all.

But not looking is sort of impossible. With the dress off, she’s down to her bra and her underwear -- both an elegant, simple black -- and he gets a glimpse at her and his heart forgets to beat for a second. _Fuck, she perfect._ Or as close at it gets, anyway.

She moves to lie back on the bed, and acting almost on reflex, Lloyd starts to climb onto the bed, too.

“Lloyd,” comes Flagg’s cautioning voice, and Lloyd looks at him wildly, thinking this is it. This is when his balls get torn off. But Flagg just gives him an indulgent smile. “Your shoes.”

Oh. Right.

“Shit, sorry,” he mumbles, and sits on the edge of the bed again, bending down to remove his shoes, struggling to untie his shoelaces. They've become stubborn beyond fucking belief.

“And why don’t you take your shirt off, while you’re at it,” Flagg suggests. “It might get sweaty in here.”

Lloyd obeys, somehow forgetting the simple combination of movements required to pull a shirt off and scrambling, getting stuck with his shirt halfway over his head, wishing to be struck by lightning or something, just to have this awkward, fucked up thing over with. Nadine helps him get it off, and he’s stupidly grateful for it. Sweat has already broken out in his armpits and on his chest, making his skin itch. He must be flushed all over.

“Come on,” she tells him, all calm and composed, which seems to Lloyd almost like an supernatural thing, under the the circumstances.

She lies back again, spreading her legs just enough to make room for him (fuck, _fuck_ ) and he gets himself settled there, his eyes now unavoidably sliding over her, over her smooth thighs, her belly, her breasts, held firmly in her bra, but revealing just enough of her to make him want more; her thick, strange white hair, now loose and flowing, and those dark, incredible eyes he just wants to get lost in. He swallows, and he has to tear his gaze away from her to look at Flagg, waiting for his direction.

“I don’t have to tell you everything, do I?” Flagg says. “Let’s see a little improvisation, Lloyd. You know your way around a woman, don’t you?”

Well, sure. Lloyd is no virgin, not by a goddamn long shot. But he’s never really aspired for a lead role in a porno either, especially with his demonic boss in the director’s chair. Being watched, feeling Flagg’s eyes on him, scrutinizing, laughing, makes for a real acute case of performance anxiety.

 _You were the crappiest lover I ever had, Lloyd_ , whispers a sweet voice from beyond the grave.

 _Thanks a lot, Dayna,_ he thinks darkly. _Thanks a fucking bunch._

Lloyd’s usual routine when it comes to sex is simple: you do a little warm-up (and sometimes not even that), you stick it in, you get a nice rhythm going, and you wait for the fireworks to go off. Nice and easy.

But he can’t exactly apply it here. He’s pretty sure his jeans are meant to stay on, and that his dick isn’t supposed to go anywhere near Flagg’s bride.

Then Nadine is reaching for him, running her hands over his sides, up to his shoulders, and pulling him down gently, until he’s on top of her. He lets instinct take over, lowering his mouth to taste her, mouthing a spot of smooth, tender skin above her right breast, moving his lips in a slow, wet trail until he’s right between her breasts, where the bra blocks him off. She inhales and arches her back, which he takes for the universal signal for _get it off already, you dumbass._

He reaches under her, looking for the clasp of her bra, feeling like he’s fifteen again and working with two left feet, or maybe lobster claws, instead of hands. He’s done this many, many times before, for Chrissake, and he only dares to breathe again once he's managed to undo her bra, and he helps her ease it off.

Her breasts are just as perfect and gorgeous as the rest of her, and once again he’s hit with the strong feeling that he shouldn’t be seeing her like this, which doesn’t stop his dick from stirring in his pants, instinctively drawn to the action.  

 _Don’t think about it_ , he tells himself, _just don’t fucking think_. That’s the ticket. Probably the only way for him to survive this without suffering a goddamn aneurysm.

He dives right in, smoothing his tongue over the nipple of her right breast, feeling it rise and harden against him, hearing her breath catch. Spurred on by this, he takes her nipple in his mouth, holding it between his teeth, grazing it lightly, and then instantly worrying if this is a good idea, because some chicks digs it, and others really don’t.

He lucks out, because Nadine exhales sharply, and her fingers dig deep into his back, hard enough for him feel the light sting of her nails. He lets out a small moan, and licks her again.

“That’s it,” comes Flagg voice, smooth and low, and to Lloyd it sounds like there’s a growl lurking in it, making the hairs on the back of his neck stand at attention. “Get her all worked up. Show her just how _special_ she is.”

Unwisely, Lloyd’s gaze darts to the chair where Flagg is sitting, with his legs stretched out in front of him. His fly isn’t unzipped, and he doesn’t have a hand down his jeans, and Lloyd is pretty fucking grateful for that. But he still looks richly satisfied, a dark glee dancing in his eyes, and Lloyd thinks dimly that one way or another, he’s getting off on this.

Then Nadine's hands are in his hair, pulling him back to her, and Lloyd shuts up his thoughts and gets busy with his mouth, tasting her breasts, licking and sucking his way along her delicate skin, and sometimes gently using his teeth. She pulls his hair, and purely by accident (and that’s the God’s honest truth, officer), he grinds against her, his jeans against her panties, and he hears her gasp and himself groan.

Then he’s crawling back a bit, without taking his mouth off of her, because that friction is too much, too hot, and it’s probably a bad idea for him to be enjoying this, anyway.

Her leg comes up to caress his side, and he slides his hand over her thigh, all the way up to her ass. His stone dangles from his neck, dragging across her skin, as he wet-kisses his way down to her belly button, trying to imagine that they’re not being watched, that it’s just the two of them, and she does want this, wants him…

It works, for a second or two. Too bad he’s not that good at playing pretend.

His mouth is tracing her hip bone, nearing the line of her panties, when Flagg speaks up.

“I think we’re good on the foreplay,” he says, with that low voice that reminds Lloyd of some kind of nightly predator, stalking its prey in the tall grass. “Let’s see if Nadine is as wet as she is sweet.”

Lloyd shuts his eyes for a second, blood rushing to his head, making it throb.

_Don't think. Don't think._

He hooks a finger in the waistband of Nadine's panties, and he looks up at her, looking for confirmation. He can’t for the life of him tell if what he sees in her eyes is lust, or fear.

“Go on,” says Flagg instead, and Lloyd can hear his wide smile, feel his mocking eyes. “She won’t bite.”

And with that imagery in mind, Lloyd pulls her panties off, slipping them off her legs as she raises them, feeling himself getting harder almost despite himself.

“Time for the main course, I think,” Flagg says. “Open up for Lloyd, dear.”

She opens her legs wider, letting him see everything, and his heart start speeding badly.  

“ _Eat her up_ ,” Flagg purrs. “Go on, Lloyd. I know how hearty your appetite can be.”  

Well, there goes his tentative hard-on. Lloyd can’t think of a single thing that’d kill the mood faster than that little inside joke. A bitter taste rises at the back of his throat, as if something had crawled up and died there.

What makes things even worse is that he isn’t what anyone would call an expert at giving head. Lloyd can count the number of times he’s gone down on a chick on one hand. The few times he did give it a shot, he just wasn’t very good at it, so just like he did with a great many things in his life, he stopped trying, concluding that it was a whole lot of effort for not that much reward.

Now he’s really regretting his past laziness, thinking he better do his damned best, _or else_.

Nadine drapes one leg on his bare shoulder, and he puts his hands on her hips. He takes a shaky breath and brings his mouth to her cunt, his lips feeling numb and his face hot.

He gets to work.   

He licks and he sucks at her for fuck knows how long. His sense of time feels screwed, just like the rest of him. Sometimes he’ll hit a sweet spot, and she’ll moan and he’ll feel his dick twitch, a reluctant, unwilling participant in this weird game.

His jaw is beginning to ache when suddenly, there’s a too-hot hand resting on his bare shoulder. Lloyd freezes, his heart in his throat, nearly bolting off the bed.

“I know you’re doing you best, Lloyd, but we don’t have all night,” Flagg says. “Here, let me rev her up for you.”

And then the heat is gone from his shoulder, and Flagg is moving his hand -- just the tips of his fingers, really -- in a long caress along the inside of Nadine's thigh, trailing ever-slowly towards that magic spot, until he has two fingers just nearly touching her, a hair’s breadth away.

And Nadine, who has gone very rigid, pulls her head back and lets out a long, shattered moan, raw and guttural, filled with rough lust and something else, something that borders almost on pain.

It makes Lloyd jump in his skin, gripping her tighter. A choked squeak of sound escapes his throat.   

He doesn’t know what the fuck just happened. Some crazy spark of dark electricity has gone between them, and it seems even Lloyd has gotten a small taste of it, judging by how his hard-on, previously at a awkward half-mast, has gone fully rigid.

Nadine is writhing, moving her hips in a kind of desperate dance ( _can’t get no satisfaction,_ Lloyd thinks numbly), and Flagg looks down on her and smiles.

“There. She’s all yours.”

Lloyd puts his mouth back on her, and it only takes a couple of licks before she’s shuddering into his mouth, coming hard. She’s breathing roughly, trembling, and Lloyd keeps a hold on her until she goes slack, and doesn’t let go then, either. He strokes his thumb over her hip, trying to tell her… what? That it’s okay? Fat chance of that. He’s not even sure why he’s doing it. It just feels like the thing to do.

“Now, that wasn’t so hard, was it?” There’s a wink in Flagg’s voice, and Lloyd figures the joke is on him, since he’s plenty hard, uncomfortably so. He keeps his hands on Nadine, who is looking up at the ceiling, and he feels like he’s catching her in a more intimate moment than anything they’ve done tonight. “Good work, Lloyd. I’m sure Nadine has enjoyed herself quite a bit. Haven’t you, dear?”

She doesn’t answer right away, and to Lloyd, it seems she’s gone someplace very far away. He keeps moving his thumb in slow circles, thinking maybe she’s better off, wherever she’s gone off to.

“Yes,” she says finally, and her voice is small and brittle. “Thank you.”

Lloyd doesn’t know which of them she’s thanking, but he sure doesn’t feel like he’s done anything thanks-worthy. Pretty much the opposite.

“That’ll be all, Lloyd.”

He sits up, collects his shirt and hastily pulls it on, managing not to get stuck in it, this time around. He gets up and heads for the door, shaky-legged and sore-jawed.

He shoots one last look over his shoulder, but Nadine is still looking up at the ceiling.

He goes.

\---

Her prison is lush, the very finest suite in the MGM Grand, and she imagines she can see the ghosts of the men who stayed here in the world of _before_ , laughing, drinking, snorting line after line of cocaine, their hands roaming greedily over the bodies of expensive strippers. But aside from those lewd ghosts and the fine, stylish furnishings, the suite is mostly barren, undecorated. He lover is a walking man, a traveler, and settling down was never in the cards for him.

She feels cheated. She had tied a noose around her neck and walked herself surely off the hanging platform, only to be left to dangle, choking but very much alive, clinging to a sanity that she no longer had any need or desire for. She was meant to disappear, to be submerged in delicious insanity, not to be trapped in this joke of a half-life.

She was meant to to be reborn, to become somebody else...

 _Oh, but you have become someone else,_ whispers that hateful voice in her head, _You’ve become a murderer, several times over._

She slides a mask on, the mask of the fearful, obedient, loving bride, over a walking skeleton of her old self. And she tells herself that there’s no use for regret now. She came to her intended, bringing her soul on a silver platter, and there are no refunds, no returns. She would just have to wait, ever-patient, and eventually the time would come, and she would be gone.

Much of the time, she’s left on her own. Her dark lover doesn’t share her bed ( _You understand, dear. If I spent the night with you, I just wouldn’t be able to_ help _myself)_. He doesn’t sleep in the suite at all, preferring to take his rest in the desert, but his cold seeps into her anyway, settling deep in her bones and nerves and sinew.

Sometimes he’ll put his arm around around her and whisper in her ear, tell how he will take her down every deserted highway, show her the hidden doors in every crooked, foul-smelling alley. He tells her how they will rule this ravaged world, how she will be his queen, his love, his dear, sweet Nadine.

She doesn’t believe him.

All the words that once, from a great but intimate distance, sounded dark and delicious and undeniably true, now sound hollow and lifeless, even trite. His presence, that cold dark shadow that used to caress her in the night, that used to pull her towards him like a long and inescapable leash, has grown stale and moldy.

She thinks her near-husband relishes the thrill of the hunt better than he likes the taste of fresh kill in his mouth. Maybe she’s become less interesting to him, now that she’s indisputably his.

But isn’t that how most relationships go?

Once you meet your demonic beloved, the romance goes right out.

Sometimes she wonders if this great seduction has been nothing more than a perverse, delightful little joke to him. The dark man is a solo act, and she was never intended to be his partner, his _love._ He needs her for something else entirely, a dark purpose yet undiscovered.

_You’ve been had, dear, but don’t you worry. You only paid the ultimate price._

For now, they play. For now, they have their nightly ritual, starring the right-hand man. He always comes freshly shaven and smelling of soap, though whether the extra effort is for her benefit or part of his usual routine, she doesn’t know. He may come prepared, but he always looks like a below-average student facing a pop quiz.

When she allows herself to feel, which isn’t often, she feels a distant kind of pity for him. He’s just another fly caught in _his_ web, and he seems to be honestly trying to do his best at the duty assigned to him, however awkwardly-fitted he seems to be for the task. When their eyes meet, she sometimes sees something like concern, or maybe guilt.

A lot of good that does her.

When he stalls or stumbles, which is often, she does her best to lead him, trying to make things smoother and easier on the both of them. After her weird sex olympics with Harold, it would take more than playing at a little pornographic theater with a fumbling lieutenant to faze her.

But _he_ ’s there, watching them, lazily pulling their strings, fitting their bodies together for his amusement. His suffocating heat pulsates and clings to her skin, as he smiles and basks in their discomfort, in her nakedness and vulnerability. After all, it wouldn’t do for her to forget that there is no part of her that he doesn’t own, inside and out.

And sometimes he will cut in, and he will _touch_ her, and the years-long ache, the deep and endless throb inside her will rise to an unbearable crescendo, ripping moans and cries and pleas out of her, making her need more, _more_. Lloyd startles then, and he holds her tighter, as if to soothe her, and in those moments she is grateful for him, the only thing tethering her to something like reality, even if there’s little he can actually do.

She comes, every time. That’s the idea, isn’t it?

Her husband-to-be is very invested in her happiness.

\---

The only time their special connection retains some of its old spark is in her dreams.

_She walks towards a dead carnival town, and there’s the smell of cotton candy gone sour, and there’s a distant, broken melody of a merry-go-round, a memory of a long-gone childhood._

_Above her, looming large, a sign that reads:_

**_ALL YOUR DREAMS COME TRUE_ **

_buzzing with delicious electricity, with sparkling colors._

_She walks forward, step by step by step, and then, as if somebody pulled the plug, the letters start to fizzle out, going out one by one, and she stops._

_The melody comes to a slow, discordant halt, and there’s only the dark and the silence, thick and cold and absolute, enveloping her._

_She wants to cry out but her throat won’t make a sound. She’s alone, seeing nothing, hearing nothing, feeling nothing but her growing terror. No, please no, don’t leave me like this, don’t leave me alone here oh please_

_“Oh, but you’re not alone, my dear.” And he is slipping around her, his cold touch her only solace in the dark. He slides one hand over her throat, and the other between her legs, and he’s everywhere, inside her, slithering in, hard and cold..._

_“Never alone.”_

And she awakens in sweat, in heart-pounding terror and soaked between her legs, to the rise of the heating sun. It takes a few long minutes for her to calm down, and then the numbness settles on her once more.

She walks around the suite, or sits on the sundeck and watches the city below, trying to lose her mind the slow, old-fashioned way, and while it may check out here and there, it doesn’t seem to leave her. She watches the slowly emptying moon above, and she waits.

\---

Whitney looks concerned for him, and Lloyd can’t blame him. He finds himself tuning out far too often, thinking thoughts he probably shouldn’t be thinking.

The nights he spends with Flagg and Nadine seem to fade into unreality as soon as he stumbles out of their suite, burnt into his mind like fever dreams, making him wonder whether he hadn’t imagined the entire thing. He can taste her on his lips for hours, even days later, and he waits for the next night with a strange mix of dread and guilty anticipation, until he’s called in again.

There are rare times where he sees Nadine outside those nights, when Flagg brings her out, leading her on his arm dressed all pretty, and Lloyd’s gaze is drawn towards her before he forces himself to look away, his heartbeat picking up and his face burning.

It’s like he’s under a spell of some kind, and it makes a sort of sense, he supposes, that the Walkin Dude’s bride would be packing some magic of her own.

It feels wrong jerking off thinking of her, even when he gets so hard that he’s sore. (Okay, that’s a lie. He does, in desperation, jerk it a couple of times, but he tries not to think while he does it and he feels pretty bad about it after.) Mostly what he does is take cold showers, in addition to his usual long, scalding ones. Sometimes it feels like all he ever does when he’s not working, or working between Nadine’s legs, is taking showers.

He catches himself wondering things he shouldn’t, like what the hell kind of relationship she and Flagg are supposed to have. The way Lloyd sees it, love and Randall Flagg go together as awesomely as ketchup and peanut butter, or some other truly revolting combination. But he remembers how she stiffens, how she moans, how she turns into an exposed live wire whenever he touches her.

It’s fucked up, is what it is. The whole thing is pretty badly fucked up, and Lloyd doesn’t know how he fits into this twisted picture, or whether he even should.

(Nobody asked him, and he isn’t supposed to be wondering. He’s supposed to be doing what he’s told.)

He tries to focus on the practicalities, and one of those is upping his game. If he’s going to be eating pussy every night, he might as well sharpen up his skills some. He decides to ask a friend for advice. Whitney has, to put it real gently, less than movie star looks, and personality can only carry you so far. To snag a babe like Jenny Engstrom _and_ keep her interested, the guy’s gotta have some tricks up his sleeve.

When Lloyd brings up the topic, trying to be casual about it, Whitney looks at him funny and asks if he’s got a new girl, to which Lloyd says it’s none of his goddamn business, and he’s asking for general knowledge, anyway. Whitney gives him some vague, but hopefully helpful advice about how he’s gotta _ease her into it_ , and _really mean it, not like you’re doing her a favor_ , and _do you know where the clit is?_ (to which Lloyd happily shoots back: _I know where your mom’s clit is._ ) Finally Whitney suggests he’d be better off asking Jenny if he’s that interested, and Lloyd, feeling a blush creep up his face, tells him to go fuck himself. He briefly considers finding some old magazines and checking out the sex advice section, but Jesus, he’s not _that_ desperate.

The sun is beginning to set as he sits in the Cub Bar, setting up a fresh spread of solitaire, and he’s remembering how she was on that first night, spooked and haunted, about ready to jump out of her own skin just to get away from the man she was coming to meet. She looked like a trapped animal.

And Lloyd knows what that’s like.

He thinks she must be feeling pretty scared, and lonely.

He tries to chase the thoughts away by repeating the same old incantation: _None of my business. Not my job._

Then he thinks, with a flash of spiteful annoyance, that if Flagg didn’t want him thinking about his bride, he shouldn’t have Lloyd go down on her every night.

None of his business. Not his _fucking_ job.

The Queen goes on the King, and then the Jack goes on the Queen, and before he really even thinks about it, heat is rising to his face again, images flooding his mind, and he curses under his breath, sweeping the game.

Great. Now he can’t even play solitaire in peace.

\---

“Lloyd, I’m going away for a few days,” says Flagg, and claps him chummily on the shoulder. “You’ll hold the fort, won’t you? And you’ll make sure my darling Nadine has everything she needs?”

Lloyd nods, already feeling the sweat start to prickle on the back of his neck.


	2. Dancing in the Dark

_He’s too far to stop you,_ she thinks. _This is your chance, as good as any._

She looks down, down at the Las Vegas street far below, and she wonders, if she took the leap, how big of a mess she would end up creating for the cleaning crew.

A knock on the penthouse door interrupts her musings; it’s hesitant at first, then grows more insistent. She hears the door open, and then Lloyd’s voice, “Hello? Nadine?"

Her name sounds awkward on his lips, and she doesn’t think she’s ever heard him use it before.

“I’m here,” she calls out, barely raising her voice.

Lloyd comes up onto the sundeck a few second later, looking flustered.

"Sorry. I tried knocking, but there wasn't no answer. I thought-- I just wanted to make sure everything was okay.”

“I’m fine, Lloyd,” she says with a reassuring smile. “I was just enjoying the view.”

He seems to take her at face value, nearing the railing to have a closer look.

“Helluva view, ain’t it?” he says. “It’s like the whole world is down there. Well, the whole world and a hell lot of desert.”

She looks down at the sunbaked, half-dead city, and she thinks he has it right. This _is_ their whole world, and it’s narrowing fast.

Lloyd looks like he’s about to speak, but he struggles with it. He doesn't seem to know how to talk to her, or even how to look at her, and she can’t exactly blame him for that; he has, after all, spent the large part of their acquintainship between her legs, with barely a word spoken in between.

“The big guy -- Flagg, I mean -- he asked me to check in on you. Make sure you’ve got everything you need. I brought you some food. Left it on the coffee table.” He gestures a thumb back at the penthouse. “But I thought... maybe you’d like to come down and eat with us? It’s just me and a couple of the guys. The Vegas high command, guess you could say.”

Getting chummy with the locals wasn’t in her plans for today. But, as it happens, her schedule is wide open.

She accompanies him downstairs, to a casino-adjacent bar where four men sit chatting around a table. The conversation dies as soon as they see her, and even after Lloyd introduces her and they sit down to eat, it never quite comes back to life.

They barely meet her gaze at all, and the ones who look at her do so guardedly, regarding her with a mix of curiosity and fear, of wonder and pity. She’s at once the stranger, the wicked queen, and the virgin sacrifice, the girl chosen by the village to thrown into a pit of bones and devoured by the great beast they’ve all chosen to worship.  

The only man halfway willing to engage her in conversation, even if it’s mostly about the food, is the cook, Whitney Horgan, who looks at her with something close to genuine sympathy.

Lloyd looks uncomfortable, seeing that he’s made a misstep, trying to pretend she’s one of them. Once they’re done with lunch, he offers to take her on a little tour of Vegas. She agrees.

Lloyd, as it turns out, is significantly chattier without Flagg looming in the background. He leads her across large streets that have been cleaned of bodies and the signs of looting, and he shows her around some of the local landmarks, either deserted or repurposed. He lays out the city operations using a simple but colorful vocabulary, and occasionally even sprinkles his speech with anecdotes from the old days of Vegas, when mafia families ruled the casinos. When she asks where he learned all this, he explains he mostly heard it from Ace High, who was a Vegas native before the flu.

Nadine has a hard time seeing the charm of the city, and she doubts she would have liked it much even in its liveliest, most glittering prime. She gets the impression that Lloyd does genuinely like the place, though, for all its very obvious faults.

Quite a lot about Lloyd seems oddly genuine, all things considered, which is a refreshing change from other company she’s kept in recent memory.

He tells her about the telephone crew, and how the main operator makes _some mean coffee cake;_ he talks about the establishing of law enforcement ( _never thought I’d have a hand in running a goddam police force, I’ll tell you that_ ), and about the school they’ve gotten going for the children of Las Vegas. The last topic sends an dull twinge to her heart that she ignores.

There are gaps in his speech, times when he trails off with a small frown and skips to a different topic, and she guesses he’s skirting around the less upbeat realities of the city, such as the resurrection of advanced warfare and the steep punishment for disobedience -- the parts that might be uncomfortable for her hear, or for him to talk about. And of course, there’s the other big topic that gets danced around, the subject of the “big guy” himself, and the puppet theater he makes them play every night.

They pass by a book store and she asks him if he would mind if they made a little stop. She picks out some paperbacks, mostly light mysteries, that she doubts she’ll ever read, and Lloyd stands by the door, his hands jammed in his pockets, surveying the premises with the lost, wary look of a soldier who’s been thrown behind enemy lines. After a minute or so, he wades over to the children’s section.

“Aren’t you a little old for those?” she asks, gently teasing.

Lloyd, who has been flipping through a coloring book full of cars and dinosaurs, shoots her a confused look, then laughs a little. “Oh, it’s not for me. We got a kid in town, four years old. Name’s Dinny. Great kid, real sweetheart. You want to meet him?”

That’s one of the very last things she wants. She still manages a smile as she shakes her head.

“Maybe some other time.”

The sun is beginning to set when they make it back to the Grand, and he escorts her to the door of her ( _his_ ) suite.

“Thank you, Lloyd,” she says. “I had a lovely time.”

In a move that’s in part genuine and in part rather calculated, she leans and presses a sweet little kiss to his cheek.

The flush that goes through him is impressive to behold. He looks back at her, pleased, but at the same time, starved and wanting. It takes him a moment to get his voice back.

"Yeah, sure. Just doing my job,” he says, reaching back to scratch the back of his neck. He watches her for a moment that drags too long. “Well, I better get going. It’s gettin’ late.”

He starts to turn, and she makes her decision before she even knows exactly what it is that she wants from him.

“Lloyd, wait. Do you want to come in?” she asks, and gives him a strained smile. “It gets awfully lonely in here.”

He only hesitates for a moment.

“Sure,” he says, caught.

\---

Nadine pours them drinks, and Lloyd is a bit wary about accepting at first, but he gives in easily enough.

They come up to the sundeck and watch the sun disappear into the desert, painting it with a long stripe of blood and orange. The city lights spark to life, though they don’t quite live up to their neon glory of old, as she imagines it. Much of the city remains dark beneath them. The Grand is all lit up, though, a beacon of _his_ power.

For a while, they don’t really speak, but then the alcohol starts to work its magic, and Lloyd gets talking.

“You came from the east, didn’t you? What was it like, over there?“ Well, there goes her theory that Lloyd imagined her fully formed in the desert, a strange Venus birthed from the sands of the Mojave. “ _He_ says they’re a bunch of sanct-- sancti-- bunch of God-fearing freaks who worship an old lady and have their heads crammed so far up their asses they can taste their own colons.” He stops and shoots her an apologetic look, suddenly aware that his language might’ve gotten a little too colorful for the present company. “Sorry. His words. Give or take.”

She has no doubt that Lloyd is paraphrasing, and not just because the word _sanctimonious_ doesn’t seem to roll easily off his tongue. Mostly, she thinks he’s sugarcoating. She doubts her husband-to-be would call the Free Zone’s sacred idol anything as delicate as an _old lady_.

“It wasn’t all bad,” she says, though she has very little desire to revisit those memories. “For a while, I wanted to stay. But I didn’t belong there.” _You were a stranger among them, the odd woman out. And then you and Harold went and blew up their committee, and you’re certainly not very welcome there now._ “My place is by his side.”

Lloyd looks doubtful, perhaps too used to hearing the well-rehearsed party line, but well-trained as he is, he only nods gamely and says, “Right.”

He pulls out a pack of Lucky Strikes, and glances at her. “Okay if I smoke?”

She nods, even though she doesn’t particularly like the smell.

“You want one?” he asks, holding the pack out to her with one cigarette sticking out.

She doesn’t really, but she pulls out the cigarette anyway and holds it delicately between her fingers, a sexy smile playing at her lips as she slips back into that sweetly seductive persona that she played so perfectly for Harold’s benefit. “Light me up.”

His eyes never leave her, and it takes him a couple of flicks to get the lighter on. He brings the flame over and lights her cigarette. She draws a puff, and it warms her lungs, and suddenly she’s coughing, trying expel the stinging smoke.

“ _Shit_ , you okay?” Lloyd looks startled, nearly panicked, and she can’t help but laugh even as she coughs, her eyes stinging, because she can imagine the scene he must have playing in his head, of trying to explain to his boss, _the big guy,_ how he accidentally killed his bride using nothing but cigarette smoke. She nods and waves him off, and Lloyd relaxes, even snickers along a little. “Guess you’re not much of a smoker.”

“No,” she admits ruefully, blinking the tears away. “I haven’t smoked since college.”

And even then, she only tried it a couple of times, joining in when the other girls were doing it.

“College,” Lloyd says it with a funny sort of admiration that tickles her, as if she just told him that she’d visited the moon. He seems stumped on how to follow that up, though -- it’s probably not in his usual wheelhouse of conversation -- until he comes up with, “What did you study?”

It’s been a while since she had a conversation so mundane, and it feels so very out of place here, on _his_ sundeck, with a slimming moon spelling death above them. But maybe the faraway past is the only safe thing left to talk about. She can talk about the woman she used to be, because that woman is as good as dead.

“I was getting a teaching degree,” she says. “I taught elementary school for many years.”

“No kidding,” he says, probably surprised that Flagg’s mystery woman has such a mundane origin. “Well, those were some lucky fuckin’ kids. I wish I had a teacher like you. Maybe then I would’ve actually learned a thing or two.”

Well, that’s a line Nadine hasn’t heard in a long time. She looks at him with a quirk of her brow, wondering if he’s even noticed his head-first stumble into _hot for teacher_ territory. Lloyd catches on a moment later, and quickly tries to correct his slip-up. “Jesus,” he laughs, “that came out all wrong. I didn’t mean it in a dirty way. All I meant is, I bet you were real good at it.”

 _Smooth save,_ she thinks, unable to help a smile that twitches treacherously to her lips.

“Yes, I suppose I was,” she says. “But it was such a long time ago.”

Lloyd nods and looks thoughtful, seeming to clock in on the fact that she isn’t talking about the normal passage of time.

“Yeah. I know what you mean. Sometimes I can barely remember how it was, before. The kinda guy I was. It’s like I was a whole other person back then.” He glances at her, as if seeking her permission to go on. She stays quiet, waiting, and he continues. “I did a lot of really dumb shit, and I got into a lot of trouble. I really wasn’t worth much of anything before… before _he_ saved me.” His voice lowers at the mention of the dark man. “I was his first guy, you know. He chose me to be the first, and I guess I still don’t really know why.”

She has an idea why. It’s precisely because Lloyd would never have considered himself the first choice. Her fiance isn’t interested in the prideful and power-hungry; those are to be used up and discarded quickly. But someone who has spent his whole life low in the dirt, dismissed and unwanted, would be overcome with gratitude at being chosen. Lloyd seems the ideal man to serve as his right hand. All loyalty and no ambition.

 _And you?_ asks that worming voice in the back of her head. _What weakness did he see in you?_

“He really has a way of making you feel special,” she says, and Lloyd lets out a quiet huff of smoke and air, hearing both the truth of those words and the twist of dark humor in them. Evidently, Lloyd’s own honeymoon with her husband-to-be has ended some time ago. But he’s still here, a faithful servant, and so is she.

“Yeah,” he says, and their eyes meet for a knowing second. “He sure does.”

He looks away, flicking ash off his cigarette, and she can feel him gathering up the courage to ask the big question, getting ready to prod the, shall we say, dark elephant in the room.

"I hope it’s okay I’m asking, but how did you come to be… you know, with _him_?"

She thinks that’s a funny way of putting it, as if she'd come by her demonic admirer by browsing the personal ads section at a local newspaper. _Dark mystery man (?) with a wicked sense of humor seeking pure and unspoiled bride. Sanity optional._

 _With him_ isn’t really right. _His_ is a lot more truthful.

She sighs, unsure how much, if anything, she wants to divulge. Once, it was her most deeply held, viciously guarded secret, the one thing she could never reveal, that held her at arm's length from anyone who came into her life. But now, what is there left to guard? She has completed her long and destructive journey. She has come to her intended, and her days are numbered. Soon there won’t be any _her_ left at all.

"I think... I was always his, in a way. Intended for him. He was in my dreams long before any of this. More than just in my dreams. Nowhere and everywhere.” She smiles thinly. “And he finally has me, now.”

It feels strange, saying it out in the open. It’s a very shortened version of the courtship that has haunted her for most of her life, but even that is more than she’s ever told anyone. She finds herself breathing just a little bit easier, as if speaking of it out loud has released a tiny fraction of her lover’s deathly grip on her.

Lloyd looks at her with a troubled, perplexed frown, as if trying to wrap his head around it, though she doesn’t expect him to. He can’t. No one can. He looks like he wants to say something, or maybe ask her something, but he can’t quite manage it.

Eventually, he hedges with, “So he’s not a flowers and chocolates kinda guy, huh?”

She smiles, even huffs a hollow little laugh. “No. I don’t think that’s quite his style.”

“That’s a shame,” Lloyd says, and the stretch of silence that follows feels loose and a little bit charged. She can feel his eyes slipping back to her, even when he tries to look away.

“You know, there’s a flower shop not very far from here,” he says, in a by-the-by sort of way, leaning ever-slightly her way. “I guess all the flowers are dead, but I bet they still got those cute little cactuses. I could grab you one of those, if you want.” He smiles at her, easy and joking, as she guesses he’s trying to lift her spirit after her little confession, but that’s not quite what it comes across as. She watches him speculatively, until the full weight of his words catch up to him, and the smile slips from his face. “Just to make you feel more at home, you know?”

She has to hold back a laugh, wondering if he’s deeply confused about the sort of comfort he’s been tasked to provide her with, or if he’s had just enough to drink that his sense of self-preservation has been badly compromised. It’s stupid but endearing, and in a way that reminds her vaguely of the boy who had a crush on her in high school, of those warm summer nights, the touch of the soft breeze, the taste of alcohol intermingling with awkward flirtation. Maybe it’s not such a strange connection to make; for all that he holds the highest rank in the dark man’s legion, Lloyd doesn’t strike her as a man who has done very much growing up past his adolescence.

Which makes her next thought, that she _wants_ him, all the stranger. Maybe it’s just that he so clearly wants her, and she wants to remembers what it’s like to be wanted, in that simple, uncomplicated way. Or maybe it’s even simpler than that; a person who’s drowning will grab for anybody who’s nearby, even if all they do is drag that poor soul down with them. Drowning together is, after all, better than drowning alone.

But the why doesn’t matter so much. There’s a warmth in her chest, a kindling low in her belly, and it’s been such a long time since she’s wanted anything, a want that was entirely _her own_ , and she thinks: _Let me have this. Let me have him._

“Lloyd,” she says, and she reaches out very deliberately, resting her fingers on his chest. His gaze drifts down, lips parting, and she trails her fingers lightly upwards, until she has her index finger resting under his chin. With a gentle nudge, she turns his head, making him look at her. “Will you go on your knees for me?”

He looks at her with cautious wonder, his mental functions clearly having slowed to a crawl, but he doesn’t have to think too hard about it. “Sure,” he says, a little hoarsely. The penny takes a few more seconds to hit the floor, and she can practically hear it jingle. “Oh, you mean... right now?”

“Yes,” she says. “Right now.”

Lloyd looks unsure and even a little frightened, recognizing that they have crossed into murky, uncharted territory. _I’d sure like to,_ says the look in eyes, _but I don’t know if I should._ She can’t make him. Unlike her husband-to-be, she doesn’t hold any real power over him. She’s more a prisoner than a queen.

But she can see just how thin and flimsy Lloyd’s wall of resistance is. He wants her, and not, she thinks, purely in a sexual way. All she needs to do is give him a little push. “He told you to look after me, didn’t he?” she asks gently. “To make sure I had everything I needed?”

He nods, slowly. “Yeah. That’s right.”

“Then do as I say.”

Lloyd nods again, slowly but with more assurance. He stubs out his cigarette and flicks it down to the city below. “Okay.”

“Now get on your knees. Right here, in front of me.”

She turns her back to the railing, and he comes to stand in front of her, and he goes on his knees at her feet. The fire that ignites in her lower belly shocks her with its heat. _He’s doing it for you. All for you._

Lloyd looks up at her, looking a bit lost. For all of his unwise, tentative flirting, it’s clear he wasn’t expecting the night to go in quite this direction. He has no roadmap for this sort of thing, and frankly, neither does she, though the way he’s looking at her, he seems to believe that she has a clear view of their destination. And so he waits, by now used to taking orders, not daring to make a move of his own. The reins are in her hands alone.

And she likes it this way, she decides, quite a bit. It lights a strange and new excitement in her, a feeling of power and possibility.

“Take your shirt off,” she tells him, her voice smooth and low. “Let me see you.”

He does as he’s told, peeling his shirt off in record time, and then tossing it to the side. The black stone glares at her from his chest: _his_ red eye, ever-watchful.

But _not now_ , she thinks; no, she _knows_ , or else she would be drenched in cold terror instead of savoring this new and forbidden thrill. No, they’re all alone, out of his sight, out of his mind. Maybe her fiance’s attention has grown slack; she came to him, after all, and now he can’t imagine her acting outside his will.

 _Shows what you know,_ she thinks, as she lets her eyes roam over Lloyd’s body, fully taking him in for the first time. He’s thin, on the edge of skinny, but nicely muscled, and he probably has his pre-plague troublemaking lifestyle to thank for it. And maybe it’s this new angle giving her a fresh perspective on him, but she finds that Lloyd doesn’t make for a bad view at all.

She brings a hand to the side of his face, tracing the line of his jaw, watching his throat work, his bare chest rise and fall with speeding breath. And all the while he’s watching her, waiting for her instructions, putting himself in her hands. He _trusts_ her, she realizes, but she guesses this isn’t the first time Flagg’s chosen right-hand man has had a severe lapse of judgment. 

“Tell me what you want,” she tells him.

Lloyd frowns a little, looking confused. What he wanted was never meant to figure into this little arrangement of theirs, and Nadine knows very well what that’s like.

“Dunno,” he says, his tongue flicking up to lick at his lip. “Whatever you like, I guess. Whatever makes you feel good.”

Even if he’s only saying what he thinks she wants to hear, he seems awfully sincere about it, and the idea of somebody being invested in making her feel good… well, it has an appeal. A fairly strong one.

It’s very much a first.

“All right, Lloyd,” she says softly, more aware of her heartbeat now. “Lift up my skirt. Make me wet.”

_Make me feel something that isn’t this exhausting, empty cold._

He hitches up her skirt, and carefully tucks it into the thin belt of her dress. The cool breeze caresses her thighs and sends a small shiver through her. Lloyd seems stuck for a moment, and she wonders if she’d given him too broad of an assignment, until he leans forward and puts his lips to the inside of her thigh, pressing up to her in a light kiss. He drags his mouth up across her thigh, and the the sensation isn’t scalding hot or burning cold, just warm and wet, and it linger pleasantly on her skin, a sweet sensation that travels upwards and ignites a deeper warmth, making her breathe faster.

She puts a hand on his head, lets her fingers sink into his hair, holding and encouraging him.

He moves to her other thigh, pressing kiss after kiss to her skin, until he’s right between her legs, and she can feel anticipation build there: a loose, slippery warmth. He starts to nuzzle and mouth her through the cotton of her underwear, in a slow, halting way, as if testing the waters. His nose brushes her clit, making her expel a loud breath and even buck a little against him, and he glances up and grins at her, looking pleased with himself. It’s as if he was searching for treasure, Nadine thinks with amusement, and has now found the X that marks the spot. She lightly pushes his head down and he’s back at it, growing more enthusiastic and deliberate, grinding his mouth against her, hitting the spot again and again.

Her breath quickens and her fingers tighten in his hair, threading through it, digging into his scalp. His fingers starts to ease into on the waistband of her now damp underwear, but then he stops and looks up at her. “Can I--”

“ _Yes_ ,” she tells him, a little breathless. “Take them off.”

He pulls her underwear down, slowly, his tongue touching his lip, and she lifts one leg, then the other. She leans back against the railing and rests one leg over his shoulder, her heel digging into his back, resting some of her weight on him. His hand goes sliding up her thigh, settling where her hip meets her ass, supporting her.

He wets his lips and she feels his hot breath before his mouth closes on her, and then his tongue slipping between her folds, licking and sucking with a rapidly growing eagerness, heating her up with low excitement.

“That-- ah, that’s good, Lloyd,” she urges, idly moving her fingers in his hair, and that’s all the encouragement he needs to double up his efforts, to lick his way up to her clit and focus his attention there, his tongue sliding and pressing at her with little finesse, only single-minded dedication. He seems not simply eager to please her, but desperate to.

She’s getting warm all over, and the pressure is getting to be almost too much. She watches him work below her, and she can feel the sweet, building tension of her orgasm as she slowly nears the edge, but no, she decides, not _yet_. She wants more.

She pulls him away by the hair, making him stop, and he looks at her, confused and worried, as if she’s about to tell him he’s done something wrong or send him away. She doesn’t have the breath to correct him.

“Use your fingers, I want-- go inside me.”

“Oh,” he says, cracking a crooked smile. “Sure thing.”

He brings a hand between her legs, cupping her cunt, the tips of his fingers testing her slick entrance, before he eases a single finger inside her, moving it in a slow, careful slide. She sucks in a breath, moving her hips to meet him. At this point, she has little patience for slow or careful.

“ _More_ , Lloyd.” She tugs at his hair, to tell him that she’d not delicate, she won’t break. “I--”

He obeys quickly, slipping another finger inside her, filling her up, and he starts up a rhythm, sliding his fingers in and out of her, in and out. Her fingers clench tight in his hair and she pulls him to her. He takes the hint, putting his mouth on her as he moves his fingers, his tongue rolling over and tasting her clit, joining in on a concert of tight, wonderful sensations.  

And then she’s fucking herself on him, her grip on his hair growing so tight that he lets out a little whine of pain, but he doesn’t stop, and if anything, she suspects he likes it. A moan slips out of her, and he echoes with one of his own, and it vibrates from his throat and into her, and the sweet escalation finally comes to a head, and she comes in a long shudder. No totality. No sense of being taken or owned. Just her own body, released into a loose, momentary bliss.

She breathing hard, and Lloyd slows the movement of his fingers, but doesn’t stop entirely.

“Are you--” he says, looking as if he’s about to ask stupid question that he needs to ask anyway. “Did you come?”

Nadine laughs, and it’s an airy, lightly euphoric sound that sounds a bit distant from her. “Yes,” she says. “I did.”

Lloyd pulls his fingers out of her, and, sitting back, looks at them with a kind of dazed wonder, as if they’re covered in stardust. He touches his slick fingers to his lips, and her already speeding heart beats a little more wildly. Then he’s looking up at her, lips wet and slightly parted. 

“Was it good?” he asks, with a hopeful tease of a smile.

“Yes, Lloyd,” she says, and she means it. She reaches out to stroke his hair, sweet and slow. “It was good. You were very good.”

Lloyd looks as if she’s handed him a gold medal, breaking into a slightly bashful grin that she finds almost charming. He looks lighter, as if a little weight has been lifted off his shoulders.

He gives a little shrug. “Maybe you’re just a good teacher.”

She thinks he has an interesting idea of what a teacher’s job entails.

“You’re not such a bad student.”

He looks like he might be about to correct her on that, but she trails her fingers over side of his face, over the shell of his ear, over the line of his jaw, and he says nothing, only looks at her, mesmerized, leaning slightly into her touch.

She thinks of Larry, who pushed her away, and remembers how even Harold didn’t want to touch her by the end. And why would he? Her touch is poison, meant only for _him._

But Lloyd seems to only want more of her. What she sees in his eyes isn’t Harold’s greedy, juvenile lust. Oh, there’s lust there, but the look in Lloyd’s eyes is much more naked than that, full of yearning and need.

She thinks he might be hungry for something simpler than sex, that he’s looking for guidance and affection, and what’s most surprising is that she still has any left to give.

Lloyd looks unsure, not knowing what the next step is. In their previous nights together, this is where things usually ended.

“Do you... do you want to go again, or--”

“No,” she tells him. “Stay where you are. Just like this.”

Lloyd nods mutely, staying in place, looking as if he’s balanced on a knife’s edge between nerves and excitement. This isn’t part of the script _he_ laid out for them, but surely Lloyd realizes that they’ve already deviated from it quite a bit.

“You look very nice like this,” she tells him, with a hint of a smile, and he gapes at her, going a shade redder, not knowing what to do with the compliment.

She rests her thumb on his bottom lip, and without any prompting, he presses a small kiss to the tip of it, and then sucks it into his mouth, wetting it, his eyes staying on her, making her head swim lightly.

She takes her thumb out of his mouth, and she fists a hand in his hair, tilting his head back, looking into his wide, wanting eyes, looking at his wet mouth. She slides her fingers down, nails first, over his throat, and she rubs her wettened thumb in a circle over his nipple, then drags her nail over it. He shudders and gasps, and it lands low in her belly, a sweet, heady satisfaction.

She lets go of him and leans back against the railing, and she brings her bare foot up between his legs, tracing it slowly over his erection, pressing in and pushing against it. He squirms, strangling a moan in the back of his throat. It edges out of him all the same.

She could finish him off easily like this, make him come in his pants, and he’d go away happy. Grateful, even.

But she thinks he’s earned something better than that, and she would like to play with him a while longer.

“I’m going to make this nice for you, Lloyd. You’ve been very good, and I want to reward you. Does that sound good?”

“Sure, yeah,” he mumbles hoarsely. He looks up at her, and breaks into a helpless, stupid grin. “It’s been pretty nice already.”

“Well, it’s going to get even nicer. Get up.”

She nudges him gently with her foot, and he pulls himself up to his feet, slow and heavy-limbed. She puts her hands on his waist and leads him back a step, pressing him up against the railing. He’s warm under her touch, breathing rapidly, and his eyes are on her, only her. He doesn’t touch her, conditioned, or maybe even afraid, to do so without permission.

She wonders if he realizes how closely they’re courting betrayal, how they’re dancing on the very edge of it. She doubts it, because betrayal is not a thing Lloyd is built to contemplate, but he must still feel it in his gut, how risky this is. And the fact that he knows it, and is still willing to risk it just so she can do what _she_ wants with him, makes this all the sweeter.

She trails a light finger over his stomach, moving it down until she’s at the waistband of his jeans. She undoes the button, pulls the zipper down, and she puts her hand on him through his underwear, feeling him firm and hot in her grasp. A little groan escapes him, and he dips his head, his hot breath landing on her shoulder.

He’s putting himself in her hands, pliant and willing. It gives her a feeling of warm, flowing power that she never before thought she wanted, never asked for, but now she only wants _more_ , wants to get drunk with it. She wants to make him shatter and slowly fall apart, all for her. She wants to take Flagg’s loyal boy and claim him for her own.

She keeps palming him through his underwear, working him up, hearing him swallow, feeling his warm, shallow breath on her.

“Do you want me, Lloyd?”

He seems to be having trouble with his words, and he only nods vigorously until he can manage a hoarse, “Yeah.”

“How badly?”

“I--” He swallows roughly. “ _Jesus._ Bad-- real bad.”

Well, she wasn’t expecting Shakespeare.

“Good,” she says simply, and as she starts to kneel, Lloyd’s eyes go wide and startled.

“Wait, you shouldn’t--”

“I do what I want, Lloyd,” she says firmly, and it’s such an enormous, ridiculous lie that she thinks even Lloyd might call her on, if he wasn’t so presently inclined to take every word of hers as gospel. “And I want this. I want you.”

Lloyd looks down at her, his mouth slightly agape. He looks like he's suffered a mild concussion.

“Oh,” he says, his voice thick. “Okay.”

She nudges his underwear down, only halfway, leaving him half-trapped, and she flicks her tongue over the slit of his cock, with near-surgical precision.

The sound that squeezes out of him is on a much higher frequency than his normal voice, and has the edge of desperation in it. It makes her smile, but when he angles his hips slightly, eager for more, she pulls back and looks up at him, sternly.

“No moving, Lloyd,” she tells him, leaving no room for him to question her. “I decide when you come, and how hard.”

The face he makes is sort of hilarious, but he gives a jerky nod of understanding, and doesn’t move aside from that.

“Good boy.”

She pulls his underwear the rest of the way down, along with his jeans, and he doesn’t move, only drinks her up with his eyes, looking at her in that needy, awed way that she finds lightly intoxicating.

She takes him in her hand again, and gives him a slow stroke, relishing the light shudder his body gives in reply. She’s finding she likes it this way a lot, enjoys holding Lloyd in the palm of her hand, enjoys being in the driver’s seat, in complete control, with him at her mercy.

“I want to hear you beg, Lloyd,” she says, quietly and reasonably. “Will you do that for me? Beg me to let you come?”

He looks at once turned-on and confused by the request, and he gives her a shaky, only half-apologetic smile. “Shit-- I don’t think it’d take much.”

With her free hand, she pinches his ass, a sharp reminder of who’s in control. Being funny won’t help him now.  

He lets out a strangled little sound and swallows thickly, playing at being stubborn, as if she doesn’t see right through it. She begins rubbing her thumb over the slick head of his cock in slow, leisurely circles, and he squeezes his eyes shut, breathing roughly. About five seconds later, a small whine edges out of his throat. “Shit-- shit, please. _Please_ , Nadine.”

It's a little terse, but she decides it'll do. What he lacks in eloquence, he makes up for in great sincerity.

She takes him in her mouth, and by now she’s had enough practice at this (and maybe some natural talent comes into it as well) that she knows how to make it very, very good.

She licks along his length, sucks him in deep and swirls her tongue around the head of his cock, and she looks up to meet his eyes, and he looks back at her, enraptured, on the verge of cracking, held together by her mouth alone.

“G-god,” he stammers hoarsely. “Oh God, Nadine.”

She likes that. She especially likes how his reverence lands not on God (who has forsaken them a long time ago), but squarely on _Nadine._

There’s pleading in his eyes, and he’s gripping the railing so hard, she worries he might find a way to topple off of it.

She keeps at it, sucking him dry, claiming every broken little piece of him, digging her fingernails into the yielding flesh of his ass and listening to the choked, desperate sounds that come out of him.

She can feel him edging close to his release, and she stops, pulling back, and she looks up at him.

He looks sad and betrayed, and she thinks he’s about to start whining, but she holds his gaze firmly, and he doesn’t say a word.

“Lloyd,” she says softly. “You’re mine, aren’t you?”

“Yours,” he echoes quietly, and swipes his tongue over his lips, as if tasting the word, trying to comprehend it. He nods slowly. “Yeah.”

It doesn’t matter that he would most likely agree with anything she said, just now (she believes it’s called _confession under duress_ ). What matters is that in this very moment, he’s hers, and hers alone.

And she puts her mouth back on him, and she sucks him to a finish. He comes undone, thrusting weakly into her mouth, and she swallows after him, before letting him slip out of her mouth. He watches her with a slack mouth and dazed eyes. Then he sags back and slides down until he’s sitting bare-assed on the sundeck floor, his eyes staying on her all the while.

_Hers._

She joins him, and they sit, their shoulders pressed together, sweat clinging to their skin in the chill of the night air.

She reaches to stroke his hair, and he leans into her and presses a small kiss to her shoulder, and she thinks, with a strange sense of exhilaration, that there is no going back from what they did.

\---

Lloyd is in deep shit.

That’s nothing new. Most of his life has involved stepping into puddles that seemed shallow at first glance, but then turned out to be deep pits of shit, all too happy to take him down for a swim.

But this feels different. It feels like a line has been crossed.

 _(It wasn’t_ crossed _, you dumbshit. You_ crossed _it. Cartwheeled right the fuck over it.)_

It’s very rarely a good idea, fucking the boss’s wife; if you trust the movies, a good half of mob lieutenants get whacked thanks to a case of stray dick, and force-fed their balls, before that. And it pays to remember that Lloyd’s boss is leagues scarier than that; Flagg could make any cigar-chomping mobster wet his pants.  

But _Christ,_ it’s not that he did anything Flagg hadn’t asked him to do. He was just making sure Nadine had everything she wanted, while the big dude was away. It’s not a nailable offense, eating out the dark man’s bride as if his life depends on it, when it’s on _his_ orders. But how Lloyd felt while he was doing it? How he wanted her to look at him with those deep, dark eyes, and see right into his soul? How he was sure that he’d take a dive off the Grand for her, if she had only asked him to?  

That’s bad news.

He tries to tell himself that it’s fine. He didn’t do anything wrong. She’s Flagg’s bride, and he belongs to Flagg, so feeling that way about her, well, it makes a certain sense, doesn’t it?

And that thing he said, about being hers? Well, that was just sex talk, that’s all. He’s pretty sure it says right there in the Constitution that anything you say with a gorgeous woman’s mouth wrapped around your cock can’t be used against you in a court of law.

_I want this. I want you._

As he lies in bed, trying to get himself to sleep even though his heart is beating far too fast for sleep to come, he touches his fingers to his mouth, remembering.

\---

Lloyd is back the next afternoon, bringing food (including some homemade chocolate chip ice cream, a special treat from Whitney) and easy chatter, telling her little stories of the going-ons in Vegas, bringing her a little closer to people she has no real interest in knowing,

One of his stories involves Paul Burlson, the census officer, who opened a trash can and was jumped by a frenzied stray cat that gave him a mean scratching. Paul spent the entire day in a state of rising panic, convinced he had contracted terminal case of lockjaw.

“That’d be one shitty way to die, wouldn’t it?” Lloyd says and chuckles. “Believe me, if anybody’s gonna get cat-scratched to death, it’s that guy. He’s kind of a pussy.”

Her smile comes very much despite herself, and she shoves him lightly, surprising herself, and him as well.

She keeps her eyes on him, and his stupid grin melts away, and he’s looking at her in that special, lightly entranced way that she is rapidly coming to relish.

She tells him to take his clothes off, all of them, and he scrambles to comply. And when she asks if he trusts her, he nods; whatever small hesitation was there the day before is all gone now.

She takes the belt off her dress and ties his hands securely behind his back, and she asks him if he’s ever been tied up before. He takes a second to think about it, and then says that if handcuffs count, then sure, plenty.

And when he goes on his knees for her, a sweeping current of freedom, of power and defiance floods her, sweeter than anything she’s experienced in recent, maybe even distant memory. She has him eat her out, and once his mouth is wet and she's enjoying that minute of post-orgasmic release, she lets him rest his head in her lap, idly stroking his hair and shoulders.  

Once they’ve gathered their breath, she ties him to the bed, and she climbs on top of him. She grinds against him, wearing only her underwear, slowly building a delicious friction, spurred on by every helpless groan he makes beneath her, and as she picks up speed, her hand closes around his throat, and she can feel his speeding pulse as she rides him into her climax.

There’s fear, tangible and always present, in what they’re doing. When Lloyd startles and look at the door, as if expecting their mutual monster to stride in and catch them in the act, she pulls him back, making him look at her and _only_ her, making him get lost in her, in their transgression.

She spends long, dragging minutes winding him up, bringing him to the edge and then stopping and pulling back, until he’s writhing and begging her to touch him, on the edge of tears, and she finally takes pity on him and lets him come.

When they lie together afterwards, sheened in sweat and passing a lit cigarette between them, he turns his head to her and tells her, dryly and matter-of-factly, that she’s into some freaky shit, and she laughs, thinking he doesn’t know the half of it.

And they go again, and again, and again, well into the night.

\---

Her bridegroom returns with a gentle clocking of bootheels, that dusty sound that she can hear coming from a great distance, and fear begins to rise in her veins. When he comes into the room and looks at her, she thinks with surge of raw panic that he knows. He _must_ know.

But as he comes towards her, as he puts his hands on her wrists and draws her to him, she realizes that in the wild beating of her heart, he only hear her lifelong, very natural fear of him.

“Did you miss me, my sweet?” he asks, and bends to kiss her. She feels that old throbbing need rise up in her, and she’s once again like a moth, drawn into his cold, devouring flame.

But, there’s something else.

“Yes,” she says quietly, wearing a small smile. “I’ve missed you terribly.”

 _I have a secret, my darling,_ she thinks with vicious satisfaction, _and you don’t have a clue._


	3. The Killing Moon

Their nightly routine is, on the surface, much the same as before. They’re still putting on a show for him, dancing on his strings, to his tune, on his terms. But underneath it, they’re playing a different game, a secret game, hiding in plain sight even as he watches them.

They have their own language, little messages they pass along to each other. It’s in the care Lloyd takes in helping her undress, in the way their fingers sometimes meet and thread together, in the kisses he presses delicately to the inside of her thigh. It’s in the warmth of his hand on her hip, in the eagerness of his mouth and the enthusiastic way she meets it, in how she pulls his hair, and kneads her fingers into his scalp. It’s the way he looks at her as he drags his open mouth over her skin, and in the sly look she gives him as she meets his eyes, and in the slow, curving slide of his tongue around her clit -- a new trick that he’s learned, that makes her breath catch.

It’s in the longing, lingering look he gives her each time before he leaves. She knows that she will follow him well into the night, linger on his skin, slip into his thoughts like a ghost (a _sexy_ ghost, she hears him correct, so maybe he’s not the only one infected).

She will haunt him as he tries to sleep, lie down beside him, her fingers trailing over his chest as he touches himself, and that thought brings her a breathless excitement.

Maybe she’ll even visit his dreams.

When she feels especially daring, she asks her husband-to-be, sweetly and gently, if she could borrow the leash for a little while, and be the one giving the orders.

He laughs at that, and seems to only get a kick out of it. _Why, anything for you, my wicked little Nadine._

It becomes a delicate, dangerous dance then, given rhythm by the accelerated beating of her heart. The power flows differently, and she has Lloyd’s enraptured attention, has him at her fingertips. She has a voice then, and a voice is a beautiful, dangerous thing to have. She guides him with sweet, ruthless precision, playing her part and playing herself in equal measure.

She takes him in her hand (never her mouth, not in front of _him_ ), and brings him to a slow, aching climax. She makes him put his hand on himself and jerks himself off, his eyes on her all the while, his lips parted and wet, and she lets him know that even though they’re not alone, it’s only her he needs to think about.

And she worries, she fears that _he_ will see this thing between them. That he will smell it on them -- if not on her then surely on Lloyd, who seems so very transparent to her. But maybe Lloyd is better at obfuscation than she thought, or maybe her intended suffers from a kind of selective blindness, because he doesn’t seem to catch on. Then again, she thinks when her mind slips in a bleaker direction, maybe even this is a part of his game, and they’re fooling only themselves.

But whichever way it is, she now has something to reflect fondly on and even look forward to, in the dead, dragging hours of the day. It’s odd that she should have such a thing, here at the end of her road. She shouldn’t have it, or even want it; she’d be better off steering clear of anything that even smells of attachment, but she clings to it with jealous tenacity all the same. It’s _hers_ , her one escape, letting herself be lost and swept up in simple pleasure; it's a small, modest oasis they’ve carved for themselves in this cold, endless desert.

\---

Something is rotten in the city of Las Vegas. There’s a nervy restlessness in the air, a thick scent of unease, and Flagg smells it, too, maybe more than anyone.

The two spies sent by the Free Zone, the Judge and Dayna Jurgens, went out on their own terms, deviating from his plan for them. And Tom Cullen has escaped into the desert, probably lost to him forever, no matter how many search parties he sends. More and more things seem to go, shall we say, _awry_.

Sometimes he stands on the sundeck, his boots hovering several inches above the floor, and his eyes fixate on a distant point on the horizon. And when she looks at that spot, she imagines she sees storm clouds gathering. A great storm not of his making. A silent thunder in the distance, slowly closing in.

She sees flashes of uncertainty in his eyes, even fear. Her dark lover is coming apart at the seams, it seems. She wonders, once all those layers of him have been unraveled, peeled off, blown off by the wind, if at the center of him, there will be

_nothing._

It’s then that she begins to feel a slippery, treacherous hope, though she doesn’t know what she could possibly hope for. If the dark man goes down, then so does she. So do the rest of them. The whole city, going down, down...

And even if she had something to hope for, it might now be worth the trouble; when she begins to hope, she begins to hurt.

\---

_She’s running, running, and small rocks cut into her bare feet, but she won’t stop, can’t stop. Not ever. If she stops, they will catch her, and if they catch her..._

_Oh, you don’t want to know what happens when they catch her._

_So she’s running, and she’s falling, and scrambling back to her feet, a horrible mad panic thumping in her chest, her feet smeared with stinging blood._

Where will you go, Nadine? Who will have you?

_She runs, and it hurts, and her lungs burn, and she hears them behind her, gaining up on her._

_They_ know _, and they're coming._

_What will she do when they catch her? Will she cry and confess? Try to explain? Beg them for mercy?_

_It won’t matter. They won't listen. They will catch her and they will rip her clothes off, and they will string her up on a tall tree, and they will laugh and jeer as she swings. They’ll string her up, tear her apart, burn her on the pyre..._

_They know what she’s done. They’re coming._

You better run, dear.

 _She hears them chant behind her, yelling, cursing at her, his_ bitch, _his murdering cunt, she’ll get what’s coming to her, oh yes she will._

_Shouldn’t she stop? Shouldn’t she let them catch her? Isn’t it just what she deserves?_

_She keeps on running._

_And in the west, his dark, looming presence, her single solace._

_Only he will have her. Only he will protect her._

_So she runs to him, and she falls, and gets up, and keeps on running._

\---

A man is being crucified by the fountain at the foot of the MGM Grand, for dereliction of duty. There was a fire in Indian Springs, with casualties, _strategic_ casualties, and the condemned man was accused of failing to keep watch and preventing this “accident”.

Nadine doesn’t attend the ceremony. _No need for you to see the unpleasantness, dear,_ Flagg told her, with a loving, soothing (mocking) grin.

Luckily for her, the screams carry all the way up, and they last for many hours, growing desolate and pitiful, as she wishes for someone to put a quick end to him, to put an end to all of them.

When Lloyd comes to give his report in the evening, he’s looking pale and wrung out.

“Good work handling proceedings today,” Flagg tells him, laying an encouraging hand on his shoulder. “Very well done.”

It’s a small thing, how Lloyd ever-so-slightly flinches away from his touch, but she sees it.

Afterwards, when they’re together in bed, playing the game, he’s stiff, barely responding when she touches him. His eyes are unfocused and seem to evade her, even as she presses her hand to his cheek, trying to hold him steady.

He doesn’t even look back at her, when he leaves.

\---

She comes to Lloyd’s room, dressed only in her nightgown, later in the night. It’s a few floors below the penthouse, and the door is unlocked, so she lets herself in. The room doesn’t look much more lived-in than the one she's staying at; she supposes Lloyd keeps very busy, and hasn’t been bothered to decorate. A gun lays on his nightstand, next to a half-empty glass of whiskey, and a small potted cactus, spiny and with purple flowers growing out of it. He must have gotten it for her, she realizes with astonishment, and then decided, wisely, that it would be best if he hanged onto it.  

The light is on and Lloyd is lying on the large, round bed, stripped to just his jeans, his arm slung over his eyes. She thinks at first that he’s trying to sleep, but then it occurs to her that he might be avoiding his reflection in the mirror that hangs above him on the ceiling.

He lifts his arm and sits up as soon as he registers her presence.

“Nadine, Jesus. You shouldn’t come here. _He’s-_ -”

“He’s gone into the desert. It’s just the two of us.”

He looks tense and afraid for a few more seconds, and then he lies back again. As she can comes closer, she can smell the alcohol on him. His hand is resting on his stomach, and she can see it he’s holding it in a way that suggests injury. And there's blood.

“Lloyd, what happened? What did you do?”

“Huh?” he asks foggily, looking up at her with clouded eyes. She looks at his hand, and he follows her gaze, and only then picks up her meaning. “Oh, I dunno. I don’t remember. Broke a glass, I guess.” He pulls his shoulders in a vague shrug. “It’s nothing. Just, you know. Shit happens.”

She’s not sure it was as simple as an accident, but she doesn’t pry. It doesn’t really matter.

His eyes still have that distant, tuned-out look to them, and he seems reluctant to meet her gaze, but she can tell it’s not like the cold, dark place where Harold used to go, leaving her locked out and alone. The place Lloyd has gone, she can bring him out of.

“Come here,” she tells him, putting a hand on his arm to help him up, and he lets her.

She leads him to the bathroom, runs the tap and puts his hand under stream of cold water, and blood begins to wash down the sink. She has him hold his hand there while she fetches the first aid kit. She dabs the cut with disinfectant, and Lloyd watches dully, sometimes hissing a little between his teeth. Then she carefully wraps a bandage around his hand, and her mind wanders back to the time when she was nursing Joe back to health, when he was still a strange, feral boy, suffering from a rat bite. (Is he Leo now? Or is he dead? Better not think about it.)

Lloyd’s hand is trembling, and Nadine runs her thumb soothingly over the side of it. He still isn’t quite looking at her.

She walks him back to the bedroom and sits beside him on the bed. He sits, his shoulder tense, just looking at the floor for a while, and she waits.

“Jimmy… the guy who got nailed up,“ Lloyd says. “It wasn’t his fuckin’ fault, you know. He was just this scrawny kid, kind of quiet and nerdy, you know? Probably never made it past second base with a girl. He was there to take notes, like a secretary or something, not to keep watch. Flagg wanted a patsy, and poor fuckin’ Jimmy, he just drew the short straw.”

These aren’t things that are spoken in _his_ city, not in the open, and certainly not by the upper management. Nadine wonders, for the first time, how long Lloyd will last. He might’ve served well as Flagg’s man on the ground in the establishment of the Las Vegas community, but in the coming war (and war is a charitable thing to call it), he will make a poor general. If there was ever any genuine bloodthirst in him, and she doubts it, he’s long since had his fill, and loyalty will only carry him so far.

To survive, he’ll have to carve out every part of him that's still human, that still feels, and she doubts he’ll be able to do that. Her gaze slips to the gun on the nightstand, and she thinks of Harold, and the choice she left him with, on the drive to her destiny.

She doesn’t say anything. She can’t grant him absolution, and she can’t reassure him that everything is going to be okay. It won’t be, not ever again. But she can listen, and she can be there with him.

She puts her hand at the nape of his neck, a small, gentle touch, and he tips his head down and then leans into her, pressing his forehead to her shoulder, and she wraps her arms around him, holding him steady.

“Shit is _fucked_ , Nadine,” he says, in a small, choked voice.

She thinks he’s capable of some astonishing eloquence, sometimes. You could almost call it poetry.

His shoulders shake, and she holds him, slowly stroking his back. They end up lying down together, Lloyd curling up into her, and it’s as if he’s trying to bury himself in her. She’s bitterly reminded of Joe again, how he slept with his arms around her on their journey across a dead land, back when she was still herself, back when she still had hope, when she believed in something other than this looming, inevitable end.

\---

She awakens in the night, in Lloyd’s bed, to the startling realization that they have slept, in the same bed, for hours.  

But maybe the most alarming thing is that her sleep was dreamless.

Lloyd is awake now, sitting on the edge of the bed, staring vacantly at a growing crescent moon outside the window, and she moves to sit behind him.

“I killed my rabbit,” he says, and the strange statement hangs in the air for a long moment, making very little sense. “When I was a kid. I didn’t mean to, but sometimes-- sometimes I forget things, and I forgot to feed it, and-- it starved.”

It’s a jumble of words, a hoarse nighttime confession, and one that should sound funny and inadequate in light of yesterday’s brutality, but somehow, she thinks she understands. Lloyd is a man still carrying a child’s wound, and she can’t help feeling a surge of sympathy; those small wounds are often the ones that hurt the most, left to fester, untended, for many years. She’s probably the first person he’s ever told this.

She reaches for him, touches his shoulder, and turns his head to look at her.

“You were just a boy, Lloyd. It was an accident. It wasn’t your fault.” She holds his gaze, speaking in absolute. “Children are always good, even when they do bad things.”

She sounds like a echo of her old (dead) self, but she still believes it. It might be her one fundamental truth.

He tries to say something, but in the end only manages to nod, his eyes damp. He looks away, and sniffs. When he looks back at her, it’s with a tired, unhappy twitch of a smile, “Well, I’m not much good anymore.”

She can tell he’s not looking for her to contradict him. There’s a weary, matter-of-fact resignation in his voice, and he’s no longer much like a boy at all.

“You’re not so bad,” she tells him softly, and smiles. “And you’re good to me.”

He looks at her with a strange, dim kind of hope, and then he leans in and presses a kiss to her jaw, and to the side of her neck, and then to her shoulder.

And he spends the next hours, before sunlight begins to spill into the room, being very good to her.

\---

The moon is filling fast, the city stands on razor edge, and her soon-to-be husband is growing bored with them. She thinks it must be the eventual fate of all his playthings, however sweet or precious they fleetingly are to him.

Or maybe he’s finally seen it, this delicate thing that has grown between them, and has decided to punish them for it.

His attention turns to her, cruel and undivided, and she’ll find herself overwhelmed with lust, as if her skin has been scraped off, leaving her as only raw nerve, burning with that pulsing, throbbing need. He holds her on that agonizing edge, bucking and wanting and moaning, and Lloyd tries his hardest, with his mouth and his tongue and his fingers to make her come, but she won’t, can’t. Her dark lover has slit her wide open, left a gaping chasm inside her, and it’s only for him to fill.

She wants to crawl to him, to cry and beg him for release, _please, please, anything_ , but he looks at her with his burning eyes and his slow smile, and she knows he won’t release her, oh no, my dear, not _just yet_.

There’s no soothing her, then. Lloyd holds her as she writhes and grinds and claws and bites at him, carving vicious red trails on his skin. Sometimes she draws blood. Lloyd may hiss or flinch, but he doesn’t once try to move away. She thinks she could rip flesh off of him, and he’d take it.

And when she’s insatiable, voiceless from her cries, held at the brink of insanity, her lover, their overseer, will relent, and finally let her come, thrashing and sticky with sweat, breathless and shuddering for minutes afterwards, her fingers clenched in Lloyd’s.

\---

_What are you waiting for?_

Her window of opportunity is closing fast. There are only two paths left to her. She can wait for her inevitable destiny to claim her (consume her, destroy her), or she can take matters into her own hands and end it before he can take her, body and soul. Surely there is nothing in this life left for her, so what is it that keeps her breathing? Simple cowardice? An animal’s mindless, desperate cling to survival?

There are a few days yet to go before the full moon, and that’s when he decides to make her pay for her carelessness.

“You and Lloyd seem to be having a lot of fun together,” Flagg says, conversationally, as they’re about to start up a new round of their game, “and you know, I think I’m beginning to feel a little left out.” He walks over to her and lays a finger at the center of her throat. He drags it down in a straight, sizzling line, between her collarbones, between her breasts, as if he’s dissecting her, slicing her open to see what’s inside. “That’s not very fair, is it, dear?”

What she says matters very little, so she says nothing.

“Lloyd, you’re excused,” Flagg says dismissively, not even looking at his right-hand man. His attention is fully, undividedly on her. “Nadine and I would like to have a little private time.”

He watches her with the dark and possessive glare of a predator who has grown tired of waiting, of circling and smelling her blood. He wants a taste of her, want to tear off a nice, meaty chunk and _dig in_ , the perfect moon be damned.

The cold terror is instantly in her veins, but between her legs throbs that terrible yearning, of yes, _yes, finally_. But no, it’s too soon, and she isn’t ready, and she doesn’t _want_ it. Nadine scampers back on her bed, thinking wildly that she could run, she could make it up to the roof and throw herself off it, and then her back meets the wall, and there’s nowhere left for her to go.

“Maybe--” says Lloyd, who hasn’t left, who hasn’t even moved from his spot, and is looking at Flagg now. “Maybe I could help you out.”

Flagg turns to him slowly, with a look of sly surprise. “Is that so?”

Lloyd nods, lowering his gaze. “Yeah.”

Flagg seems to consider this, weighing it this way and that, and finally delight lights up in his eyes.

“Well, all right then,” he says. “That’s very thoughtful of you, Lloyd. Why, I thought you’d never offer. Come here.”

He wags his finger, beckoning him over, and Lloyd goes to him.

 _Coming to feed the wild beast,_ she thinks numbly, her back pressed against the wall.

“On your knees, soldier,” says Flagg in a low whisper, his eyes all on Lloyd, now. “Let’s see what you’ve got.”

Lloyd doesn’t look her way, doesn’t risk it, as he goes down on his knees. He’s clearly afraid, though she doesn’t see a tremor in him, and beyond the fear, there is a kind of clouded desire in his eyes that makes her suspect she isn’t the only one who feels _his_ dark pull, even now, after everything.

Flagg watches him, a smile lurking at the edge of his lips, a predator’s dark hunger in his eyes. He reaches down and unbuckles his belt, and undoes the button on his faded jeans, and unzips the fly.

“Help yourself,” Flagg says, and Lloyd’s Adam apple bobs, and he leans in, and slowly, cautiously puts his mouth on what he’s offered, and begins to suck. The hand Flagg lays on his cheek is gentle and loving, at first. Then, as pleasure begins to build in him and his eyes go half-lidded, his fingers start to crawl upwards. They tangle in Lloyd’s hair, closing in a dead grip. He begins to move his hips, at first meeting Lloyd’s mouth in slow, rolling motions, and soon he’s thrusting into Lloyd’s mouth, ramming into it, demanding, _taking_. Lloyd tries his best to stay on task, even as tears begin to well in his eyes, and when he gags and starts to move away, Flagg generously gives him a second to get his breath back, before he pulls him back on him sharply by the hair, and the onslaught begins anew.

Nadine watches, small and useless, cowering in the corner, her back to the wall. She can’t reach out, can’t do anything to help or soothe.

Her nails dig deep and sharp into her skin, and she makes herself look, without flinching, through all of it. Lloyd is doing this for her, not try to win her favor, but simply trying to win her another day of life, of meager sanity. The least she can do is keep her eyes wide open.

When it’s done, Lloyd nearly gags again, but he manages to swallow. Then he’s coughing, doubling over as if he’s cramping up, and Flagg is above him, watching with a lazy, satisfied smile. When Lloyd manages to straighten up, Flagg brings a hand to his face, wiping his mouth with his thumb, and pats him on the cheek.

“That was very nice, Lloyd. _Very_ nice,” Flagg says. “You’re a man of hidden talents.” He turns to look at her, and for one heart-stopping moment, she thinks he is about to take her after all, despite all this, but then he smiles and winks at her, as if indulging in a little shared secret. “Isn’t he, Nadine?”

“Yes,” Nadine says, and forces a smile that she finds very hard to hold. “He is.”

\---

She finds him hours later, in his room, after her _beloved_ has departed on a refreshing night stroll in the desert. Lloyd is just coming out of the shower, looking pale and a bit ill, his hand on his throat, slowly rubbing it as if trying to soothe an ache, and Nadine finds herself, for the first time, afraid to reach out to him.

“You didn’t have to do that.”

He stops and looks down, not meeting her gaze. She thinks, with a sick dread, that he’s ashamed to. Then he pulls his shoulders in a quick, tight shrug. “I wanted to.”

She wants to tell him he’s not thinking clearly, or, most likely, not thinking at all. He doesn’t even know about her looming deadline. He doesn’t know that there’s only death left in her.

“I’d never ask you--”

“Nadine,” Lloyd says, stepping towards her. His voice is low and urgent, even angry. “ _Christ._ I can take it. Whatever he throws my way, I can take it. But what he was gonna do to you, I--” He shakes his head, his face twisting in a grimace. “The fuck was I _supposed_ to do? I couldn’t let that happen. That’s all.”

As simple as that. He reaches for her hand and she lets him take it. She owes him that much.

“Look,” he says, an intense, imploring look in his eyes. “I’m not gonna let him hurt you. I promise. I’ll fuckin’ _die_ before I let that happen.”

The worst part is that he means it. She can hear in the nervy steel in his voice, can see in the tightness of his jaw, how he’s sealing his fate alongside hers. She can’t imagine how he expects to protect her, and can only hear the cruel prophecy of those words. He has just signed his death warrant.

And who’s to blame? Why, it’s Nadine, of course. Nadine, who has cut a trail of death and hurt on her way to her dark prince, and has now found some fresh blood, a loyal idiot who wants to save her, who looks at her as if she’s his guiding light, his reason for living. In truth, she is the rock chained to his feet, the one who is sure to drown him.

_But isn’t this just what you’ve always wanted? What you’ve been so deftly steering him towards all along? Somebody who’d be your against all reason, who would bodyshield you, who would_ die _for you?_

It’s not _true_ , she thinks desperately, and God, not like this. She doesn’t want to take him down with her, or to feed him to her grinning, leering monster in her place. But whatever her intentions were, it’s hard to argue with the end result.

She doesn’t have the strength or the will to push Lloyd away. She doubts he’d let her, at this point.

There’s a dull ache in her chest as she reaches to caress the nape of his neck, as she slips her fingers into his hair and draws him to her. She presses a kiss to his forehead, a wordless thank you. It might as well be a goodbye.

\---

_She’s running, and they’re behind her, gaining up, with their hunting dogs and their torches._

_Her lungs have burned up, and she has no air left in her, no strength left to draw breath. She falls to the ground, nothing but a spent, battered sack of bones._

_And through her dimming vision, she sees his boots, drawing closer._

_He stops, and he stands above her, casting a long, endless shadow._

_“You've been so good, Nadine, so true. You've done everything I've asked. Such a good girl.”_

_He holds out his hand and she takes it, and he helps her to her bare (ruined, bloody) feet._

_And then she sees them, all around her. Heads, mounted on sharp sticks, looking like some depraved garden decoration._

_She knows them all. There’s Nick Andros, and Stu Redman, and Sue Stern, and Frannie Goldsmith, and oh, there’s Harold, who went off the road._

_There’s Larry, whom she wanted so badly to hate. Now she can only stare into his empty eyes with terrible regret._

_One head is a little smaller than the rest. She wonders distantly, even though it makes no difference at all: was he Joe, when he died, or was he Leo._

_And there’s one more: it’s Lloyd, his face as dead and empty as the rest of them._

_Flagg smiles at her soothingly._

_“I know you’ve grown fond of him, dear, but he hasn’t been very loyal lately, don’t you agree?” He caresses her face with his cold, long fingers. “That’s all right. He’s served his purpose. It sure is a shame, though. He does give pretty good head.”_

_He giggles at his own joke, and she feels like she’s about to be sick, and she wants to scream and claw his fucking eyes out, but she’s only frozen, numb, as he draws her into his cold embrace._

_"No one is coming for you, my sweet Nadine. You're safe with me," he murmurs into her ear. "It's just the two of us, now and forever."_

\---

The next morning, as she descends to the fountain at the entrance to the Grand, still held in the shellshock of her dream, she sees Lloyd, alive, carrying little Dinny McCarthy on his shoulders, chatting with the boy, who is piloting a toy airplane.

A mad rush of relief comes over her, but it comes closely entwined with fear, and then it’s replaced with something closer to panic, when he spots her.

“Nadine!” he calls out to her, and she curses inwardly, wishing she’d stayed inside.

Lloyd comes closer, ferrying the boy, and she can now see the weary lines under his eyes, though the smile he gives her looks real enough.  

“Dinny, this is Nadine. C’mon, be a gentleman, say hello. Remember how I taught you?”

He demonstrates by sticking his hand out, and the boy follows suit, holding out his hand to her. “Hello.”

“Hello, Dinny,” she says, reaching up to take his small hand and giving it a gentle shake.

That dull ache in her chest, again.

“Why do you have white hair?”

In her time as a teacher, it was rare for Nadine to be stumped for an answer, however awkward or inappropriate a question a child asked her. Now she’s wordless, her throat clinging shut.

_Why, it’s for my demonic husband to lay his claim to me. All the better for him to fuck my brains out, dear._

The panicky ache in her chest tightens, squeezing harder and harder until it feels like her heart is about to burst, and she feels like she’s suffocating. She takes a step back, away from Dinny’s wide, curious eyes and Lloyd’s look of worry and confusion.

“I-- I’m very sorry. I have to go.”

She turns and flees back into the hotel, almost running.

\---

She's coming undone.

_(You’re going down, down, down)_

She slides down to the floor, her back against the wall, cornered, trapped, gasping for breath. She wants to thrash and kick and scream, tries to force tears that won’t go past her eyes.

She did everything he asked. She gave him everything, for nothing. For, if you think about it, a lot less than that. _The deal of a lifetime,_ mocks her relentless inner voice.

There’s a knock on the door, but she doesn’t answer. She’s made sure to lock it.

Why should she care about anything? She’s a dead woman, as good as gone. Why should she care what happens to a boy she doesn’t know, or what happens to a man she wouldn’t have given a second look back in the days when things made any kind of rational sense?

Why should she care about _herself,_ after she gave up so completely, surrendered to her dark lover’s will, and decided that nothing else mattered?

There’s something broken and mad, beating and clawing inside her, threatening to tear and spill out.

 _It's insanity_ , she tells herself soothingly, _come for you at last_.

But it's a lie, and she knows it. It's not insanity; it's _her_ , all that’s left of her.

All the parts that she meant to lose, to shed, to burn away so she could be _his_ , so she could be reborn as his perfect dark bride, those parts of her are all still there. The little girl who was always unloved and alone, even when she wasn’t; the young woman who ran with the boy in the wet grass, only to feel the dark touch come upon her; the cool and assured Nadine who had nurtured and shepherded a feral boy across a land of the dead, and then crossed every line she had promised herself to never, ever cross.

They’re all still inside her, caged, and the cage is breaking.

But God, why now? What possible use could she have for any of them?

The knock comes again. She ignores it.

She could have turned back at any moment, she tells herself, but she didn’t. And now it’s too late. _Too late._ She came to her lethal crossroads and she went off the rails long ago, much like poor dead Harold, whom she left to rot in the desert, to be picked apart by the vultures.

The road only goes one way. There are no take-backs. You can’t turn back…

But what if you could?

_Then you’d have to live with it. Live with all of it._

She shakes, wrapping her arms tightly around herself, holding back a mad laugh that wants to break through her ribcage. Tears burn at the edges of her vision, but she doesn’t cry. The best she can do is try and breathe.

The knock persists for a while longer, but she doesn’t open the door. This is hers, and hers alone.

\---

She isn’t sure what exactly has set him off. It might have been a poorly chosen word, or a glance Lloyd shot her way. Maybe it was a suggestion that sounded too much as if Flagg’s right-hand man was growing a backbone, or worse, a mind of his own.

Flagg throws Lloyd across the room, and he hits the wall with such force that Nadine thinks with a sudden horror that he might never get up again. But he stirs, groaning, and Flagg strides towards him, an animal caught in a senseless fit of rage.

“Darling,” she says, laying a gentle hand on his arm. “Lloyd was only--”

He whips around with a crazed look, regarding her with a new and terrible understanding, and then his hand is on her throat, squeezing, burning, _crushing_ , and panic overtakes her. She thrashes uselessly, her vision beginning to darken, and she thinks dimly how funny it is, that she only just discovered she still wanted to live, only to have her life choked out of her.

She sees Lloyd at the blurring edge of her vision: dazed, bloody, trying to get up, on the brink of some terrible decision. She thinks he’s about to lunge at Flagg bare-handed. She thinks _this is how it ends_ , in quick and brutal scene of domestic violence, taken to its dramatic extreme.

Then Flagg’s hand relaxes, and she can breathe again. She staggers back, nearly falling, but his hands lock around her wrists, stopping her, holding her tight.

“I’m so sorry, dear,” Flagg says, as she sucks in gulps of air. He puts a hand to her cheek, sweet and soothing, and wipes away a tear from under her eye. “Sometimes I just get carried away. But I love you _so much_. You’ll forgive me, won’t you?”

“Y-yes,” she says, her voice barely more than a croak. “Of course.”

Flagg releases her and turns to check on Lloyd, who is struggling to stand. “You all right there, Lloyd? You know I didn’t mean it, right?” He helps Lloyd to his feet, and pats him reassuringly on the arm. “Are we good?”

Lloyd manages a jerky nod, his jaw clenched tight.

“There. We’re all friends here. Almost family, you could say.”

He makes sure they still keep their nightly appointment. There’s blood in Lloyd’s mouth, and he winces as he puts his lips on her, and he does his duty, anyway.

Nadine has a strong feeling that the next time the three of them are together, Lloyd won’t be getting up, and neither will she.

\---

 _Fuck_ Flagg.

The thought, in all its awesome sacrilege, bounces around Lloyd's skull like an out-of-control, defective firecracker.

Fuck him. _Fuck_ _him_.

Lloyd grabs the lamp from the bedside table and hurls it at the wall. It smashes into a thousand pieces, making a hell of a mess. Then he forces himself to sit down on his bed, to try and make himself calm down.

Flagg almost killed him, and that’s… well, not _okay_ , but he does owe the dark man his life. It’s fair, in a way, for him to take it away.

But Flagg had his hand on Nadine’s _fucking throat_ , and there’s nothing fair, and there sure as shit isn’t anything _right_ about that.

He’s still reeling, still replaying images in his head when Whitney comes into his room. Whitney tells him that he’s planning to run, along with Jenny and Ken and a few of the others, and it feels like a sign. A crossroads. Lloyd has to make a decision, and his picks are between shitty and shittier.

_We’re going to stick together, you and me. No denials. No falling asleep on guard duty._

The promise is etched in his mind, in his heart.

Flagg saved him from death, and gave him a lot more besides. Lloyd would be nothing without him. Turning on his savior, going back on his word… it would’ve been unthinkable to him, not so long ago.

But if he lets Nadine die, or if he lets Flagg do whatever it is he means to do to her, then there won’t be much living left in him anyway, and there’ll be fuck-all about him worth saving.

So in the end, it’s the easiest fucking choice he’s made in his life.

They work out a plan, go over where the sentries are stationed and which of them can be persuaded to look the other way. They decide that they’ll also grab Dinny and a few of the younger kids, turning it into something closer to a small evacuation operation.

Whitney doesn’t seem all that surprised when Lloyd says they’ll be taking Nadine with them, but he does look scared, and he’s not the only one. They agree that they’ll split up, at least at first, to give Whitney’s group a better chance. If Flagg comes after them, he'll almost certainly start with his traitor of a right-hand man and his runaway bride.

It’s not the best plan, probably not even a good one, but it’s as good as they’re gonna get.

Lloyd can’t sleep at all that night, staring at the ceiling mirror, seeing his pale face stare back at him. He’s sick with fear just thinking about what he’s about to do. So sick that he has to run to the bathroom to puke, twice, though the second time not much comes out. But under the stomach-flipping fear, there’s something like hope, the faraway taste of freedom, of _choosing_ , of doing something that he wasn’t told to, and wasn’t decided for him.

And he thinks he’d like to see Nadine smile, for real, even just once.

In the morning, his heart is hammering like crazy in his chest as he goes to her. He goes on his knees and he takes her hands, looks up to her with wild urgency, like he’s going to fucking propose, only it’s worse than that. Much worse.

He tells her, about Whitney and the rest, about the escape plan.

“We gotta go, Nadine. We gotta run. Tomorrow. I know it’s crazy, but running is the only thing we _can_ do. We’ll just keep on running as long as we need to, ‘till we hit the fucking South Pole. You won’t be his no more, and I won’t be his, either.” He has to pause, remembering to breathe. “We’ll just be us. And if he comes for you, he’ll have to go through me.”

They’ll probably die. Hell, it’s goddamn near a sure thing. But what else is there for them?

He’d rather die hers than his.

But the way she’s looking at him, with those sad, faraway eyes, he’s sure she’s about to say no.

Then she says: “All right, Lloyd. We’ll go. We’ll run.”

She pulls him up and kisses him softly on the mouth, and any doubt he still has kicking around in his mind melts away. Everything is going to be just fine.

“Come for me when the sun goes down. I’ll be ready.”

\---

It’s a small lie, compared to the many lies she’s told. A lie that Lloyd needs to hear, a lie that would give him the courage that he badly needs, but a lie nonetheless, and it hooks into her heart, cutting a fresh wound alongside older scars.

She can picture the scene Lloyd is envisioning. They would drive for hours and days on the backs of motorcycles, through the feral howl of the wind that would lash and bite at them. A pair of the once-damned, forever on the run.

And she would have him, take him under a wide open sky. It’d be over in a minute. A lifetime of dark, inevitable promise, snapped in a stupid instant.

They would lick their wounds in the desert (she doesn’t believe Lloyd actually intends for them to go so far south that they would hide out in igloos), clinging to each other, chased by their nightmares. And by _him._

It’s a romantic vision, a sweet little Bonnie and Clyde fairy tale, and what’s Nadine if not a radical romantic?

But she knows better. She knows with great intimacy that there is no running from her dark intended. There’s nowhere they can go that he won’t follow. Nowhere they could hide from his red, vengeful eye. Even if she was no longer pure, no longer _his_ , he would still pursue them to the ends of the earth and beyond. He would come with his head-splitting grin, with his _teeth_ , and he would punish them for their betrayal.

He would start with Lloyd. He would break him, peel him apart slice by slice, and he would make her watch, and only then he would smile and come for her, his dear, unfaithful Nadine.

There would be nothing left of them by the time he was done, aside from a dark smear on the ground of something once human. But until then, he would have squeezed and torn and crushed his satisfaction out of them.

Lloyd must know this too, in his gut. He’s not that naive, only desperate, and he doesn’t see any other way out.

But she does.

She thinks that when it comes to Flagg, Lloyd still suffers from a certain failure of imagination. He believes he’s nothing without the dark man, and that belief is one of the pillars propping up this sunstruck prison city, his fast-crumbling stronghold. She’s another pillar, feeding him with her mad, conflicted desire. They could run, but their fear and their desperation would only throw fresh gasoline on his ever-hungry fire.

No. She hasn’t come all this way only to run now.

_I won’t let him hurt you. I promise._

She thinks Lloyd is a man bound to his promises, and she will hold him to that one.

And now the time has come for sweet, fated Nadine, to fulfill her own promise.

She only hopes that he’ll forgive her.

Sleep claims her late in the night, and in the dark sky above her hangs a blank, near-perfect moon.

\---

_She’s in the desert, flying above it in the dark, a gust in the wind, and below her, she can see four men, huddled together around a fire._

_They’re Stu Redman, Glen Bateman, Ralph Brentner, and Larry Underwood. Alive. (If Larry is alive, then surely Joe is, too, surely, surely…) They’re alive and they’re resting, but soon, they’ll be coming west. Coming for them._

_And she knows._

_His time has come to an end._

_(A strange elation fills her. Going down, they’re going down, down, down...)_

_She walks a dead, barren land. A wasteland, decorated with cracked, empty shells of buildings. Some cataclysm has occurred here, leaving no survivors. No one but..._

Him.

_She sees him standing on the tallest ravaged building, and then she’s there, by his side. And above them, the moon._

_“The time has come, Nadine. My time,” he smiles sharply as he turns to her. “Our time.”_

_There’s deep magic in the air, an intoxicating promise, and his eyes burn for her._

_He’s her inevitable one. How could she ever deny him?_

_She slips her hand in his, takes it of her own volition, the final acceptance._

_“I’m ready,” she says softly._

_As ready as she’ll ever be._

\---

The moon hangs in the sky, full and perfect, just like he wanted it.

Nadine is experiencing something that could be called a painful clarity, a sharpening of the senses, when even the greatest fears turn to excitement.  

This is a night of destiny, come for her at last.

She waits for him on the sundeck. And finally, he comes, her nowhere and everywhere lover, in his dusty boots.  

“Tonight’s the night, my sweet. You’ve been waiting so faithfully for so long, but this is it. Tonight’s _the night_.”

His hands close on her waist, and he's ready to take her, grinning his shark grin. And she smiles back, as cold and as hard as the moon.

“They’re coming for you, you know,” she says.

He looks at her, confused, thrown off his script.

“What?”

“I saw them,” she says. “They’re coming to kill you.”

“I don’t know what you think you saw, but you better shut your mouth, my love,” he says, and he presses his finger to her lips, and the heat of him bakes into her, growing hotter, unbearably hot. “Or I will weld it shut.”

Her heart beats wildly in her chest, as distant as the stars. No words come out of her.

“That’s right,” he says, low and ravenous. “That’s good. Now be a dear and be my wife. We wouldn’t want to spoil the honeymoon.”

Her fear is a shard of ice piercing her heart, but through it, there’s clarity:

_I see right through you, and you don’t know me at all._

“No,” she says, and shakes her head in a violent rejection. “ _Never_. I won’t be yours.”

“Oh, Nadine,” he says, all good-natured exasperation. “My silly, sweet Nadine. You’re mine already, and playtime is _over_. You’ll be my wife, and you’ll bear my child, and you will shut your useless _cunt mouth._ ”

He’s on her then, and he’s pushing her down, and her resistance amounts to nothing at all. A scream rises and dies in her throat as she looks at the moon and she thinks: _no, no, this isn’t how it ends, not yet--_

And there’s a gunshot.

A thin silence stretches, then a _drip_. Flagg looks down with curiosity, with amazement, at a red, wet, dripping hole that has opened in the center of his chest.

Lloyd stands, his face white, his eyes large and stunned, a gun is in his hand. He looks like he was the one who got shot.

And Flagg turns to him and breaks into insane, delirious laughter. It comes with a gurgle of blood.

“Lloyd!” Flagg says with a jolly good humor, as if this is a truly hilarious development, as he advances on Lloyd, step by step. “What’s _this?_ What happened to sticking by me? Have you gotten so high on the taste of Nadine’s cunt that you’ve lost your _damn mind?_ ”

_Drip, drip._

Lloyd’s finger moves, meaning to pull the trigger again, but he’s too slow. Flagg waves his hand, and a crack of bone twists Lloyd arm, much like a twig snapping off a tree, and he _screams_ , and the gun goes flying from his grip.

“Don’t you see she’s suckered you?” Flagg laughs again. “Oh, Lloyd, _Lloyd_. You’ve never been very bright, but this is stupid, even for you.”

_Drip, drip. Drip._

Another _snap._ Another bone breaking. Another howl of pain, and Lloyd goes down, curling up on the floor, clutching at his arm.

“Beg me, Lloyd,” says Flagg, standing above him, and his voice is low now, soothing and seductive. His fingers are long, and sharp, and as he lays one on Lloyd’s cheek, it cuts a fresh line of blood through his skin. “Get on your knees and tell me how very sorry you are, and maybe I’ll break you quick and easy, instead of throwing you back in that piss-stinking cell I found you in.”

Lloyd makes a choked, wet sound.

“How’s that, Lloyd? Not such a bad deal, right?”

Flagg’s fingers hook under Lloyd’s chin, not cutting, just holding him gently. He smiles, patient and forgiving.

“Fuck you,” Lloyd whispers, through his teeth, through the strain of pain. His eyes are brimming with tears, but he bares his teeth and it looks, almost, like a smile. “You… You’re not the devil. You ain’t shit.”

Flagg’s face goes blank. In another second, Nadine knows, he will tear Lloyd’s head clean off.

But the gun is in her hand. And much like the losing of virginity, it only takes a second.

She pulls the trigger.

The bullet is loaded with her heart, all that’s left of it. All the love and the sorrow, all her pain and her hate, her fear and her cold, cold _rage_

(You wanted penetration? Well, darling, you can _have_ it.)

and it rips right through her dark (cold, **dead** ) lover.

The recoil rattles her bones, and she’s shocked by how _good_ it feels.

And where her intended, her dark bridegroom stood is now

an empty silhouette,

a twisted shadow,

and then nothing at all.

There’s a blank silence, a negative space where sound should be. The lights in the city all go out, all at once, as if struck by a powerful electromagnetic pulse. The only light left is the pale shine of the moon.

Nadine Cross stands frozen, empty, and for a moment, she is once again a child of the earth, belonging to nothing and no one.

She hears rapid, shallow breathing. Lloyd’s? Her own? She can’t tell.

And then she’s shaking all over, her nerve endings bleeding, as if she had taken a dull kitchen knife and cut out an old, rotting tumor from deep inside her. She’s drawing her first breath after years and years of slow suffocation, and it’s a panting, shuddering gasp.

But she can still hold herself upright, and she can still walk. A few shaky steps take her to Lloyd, and she goes down on her knees, takes his hand, and holds it tight. His fingers close around hers, trembling, but warm.

The moon shines cold and hard above them.

But they will live to see the sunrise, after all.


End file.
